Opinion: High-quality care can lower U.S. health care costs: a case study from Brooklyn

After two decades spent working as a cancer and HIV/AIDS researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School and another 12 years heading a biotech company, I started a foundation in 2007 to identify and write about best practices in global health care, and then to find people who wanted to apply these practices and help them to do so. Little did I know then that an improbable story in delivering excellent patient care was beginning to unfold in my own backyard.

At the time, New York University’s medical center was in trouble. Its quality of patient care ranked 60th among 90 academic medical centers in the U.S.; its medical school and medical research standards were mediocre, and declining. The faculty and staff had been in continual turmoil, if not rebellion, for a decade. As financial losses mounted, university trustees worried about the finances of the entire university.

Unlike many New Yorkers, I wasn’t aware of the troubles at NYU’s medical center. I didn’t learn about them until 2013, well into its spectacular turnaround, when I was helping NYU develop