Mount Sinai Health System Participates in White House Summit on Organ Transplant
Sander S. Florman, MD, Director of the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute at Mount Sinai, participated today in an Organ Summit hosted by the White House in Washington, DC, as part of an effort to build on the Obama administration’s previous accomplishments to improve outcomes for individuals waiting for organ transplants and improve support for living donors.
At the summit, senior administration officials converged with representatives from hospitals, universities, companies, foundations, and patient advocacy organizations to announce a new set of actions that will serve as another essential step towards increasing access to organ transplants and reducing the organ waiting list.
Together with seven other academic medical centers, Mount Sinai Health System created a Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel committed to establishing a national clearinghouse of educational resources about transplant and living donation for patients, living donors and the interested public. Making previously privately held resources available to the public, the goal of this Panel is to ensure informed transplant and living donation decision-making and equity in access to quality information to combat barriers that research suggests limits access to transplants.
Resources will be made publicly available by the end of the summer of 2017.
“The availability of organs for transplantation has been far exceeded by the need, while the waiting lists continue to grow at a staggering pace, so we must find ways to increase the donor supply and to encourage living donation,” says Dr. Florman. “People’s lives literally depend on these efforts and so I commend President Obama and his administration for shining a spotlight on these issues. I am proud to participate with leaders from government, industry, patient advocacy groups and my colleagues in the transplant community to improve donation.”
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the nation’s leading integrated academic health systems and one of the largest in the New York metropolitan area. Its comprehensive system includes seven hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, over 600 research and clinical laboratories, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and the Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing. Together, the Health System comprises approximately 48,000 employees, more than 9,000 physicians, and 8,600 nurses.
As a leading learning health system, Mount Sinai combines clinical expertise with scientific discovery to improve patient care while training the next generation of health care and biomedical leaders. The Health System provides care across every stage of life, from prenatal care through geriatrics, while advancing personalized medicine through artificial intelligence, data science, and biomedical research.
Mount Sinai is consistently recognized among the nation’s leading academic health systems for patient care, research, and education. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 1 in New York by Newsweek® and No. 7 in the U.S. on the magazine’s 2026 World’s Best Hospitals list and No. 3 in the world in its World’s Best Smart Hospitals list. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai ranks No. 9 among U.S. medical schools and No. 1 among freestanding medical schools for National Institutes of Health grant funding, reflecting the strength of its scientific enterprise and leadership in biomedical research.