Northwell to Add $37M Cardiac Unit

By Arthur Schwartz  

CELEBRATING THE OPENING of the endoscopy unit. Photo courtesy of Lenox Health.

While Mount Sinai is intent on shutting down health care at Beth Israel, Northwell Health/Lennox Hill Hospital is opening a new cardiac catheterization lab in the West Village and will be bringing its in-patient capacity up to 21. And they are doing this while also planning a $2 billion expansion of Lennox Hill Hospital on 70th Street and Lexington Avenue.

Northwell is opening a new cath lab for cardiac emergencies and elective procedures at Lenox Health Greenwich Village, at a site which was once St. Vincent’s Hospital. Part of a $37 million project, the program will allow the free-standing facility to accept heart attack patients via ambulance for the first time, giving the site an influx of people who are currently being sent to other hospitals. It will also create an 11,000-square-foot inpatient unit to allow patients from the cath lab and surgical units to be admitted for short stays, with the most severe cases still being transferred out.

The new cath lab and inpatient unit will expand Lenox Health’s role in the neighborhood, filling a niche left by St. Vincent’s which closed in 2010. It is expected to perform 1,000 procedures in the first year, according to Avinash Ramsadeen, a spokesperson for the LHGV. As part of the current construction, Lenox Health will also add an electrophysiology lab for treatment related to the heart’s electrical activity, expand its blood and microbiology lab space and pharmacy, and install a kitchen to provide food services for the first time.

Lenox Health’s facility, which they call a “stand alone emergency room,” is currently only equipped to take stroke patients. In 2024 it sent 350 cardiac patients to Lenox Hill Hospital. That does not include the patients sent to closer hospitals, the most acute going to Bellevue Hospital Center and Mount Sinai Beth Israel (before it began the process of closing down). Now, those patients will be able to be treated and recover onsite once the lab opens, which is expected in June.

Cath labs offer treatments ranging from the routine opening of blood vessels to more invasive surgical techniques, making them lucrative for the large health systems that have consolidated in recent years while expanding their outpatient footprint. Beth Israel has been trying to close its cath lab for over a year, as part of Mount Sinai’s underhanded plan to close that hospital which they claim is losing money.

What is now Lenox Health Greenwich Village opened in 2014 following a model in use in West Coast health systems to decouple emergency departments from hospitals, which are expensive to build and do not admit a majority of patients who visit. In the years since, it has added to its services, performing a growing number of procedures at its emergency department, and physicians practices at the 13th Street ambulatory center.