NYU Langone: Grossman's data dashboard turned a junk-rated hospital into a $14B system

Fortune reports that New York University's medical center was a troubled institution in the 2000s. A 1998 merger with Mount Sinai went so badly that the hospitals split a few years later; by 2003 the combined entity had racked up three straight years of losses, $670 million of debt and a junk-bond rating. When radiologist Robert Grossman, who had no formal business training, became CEO and dean in 2007, the centre was independent again but not profitable. Board chair Ken Langone, the Home Depot co-founder who had joined the board in 1999, backed him.

Grossman vowed to run the school and hospital as one integrated entity. He fired most of the executive team before his first day, replaced a relatively new $35 million electronic health-record system with the more expensive Epic system, and chose to build a network of outpatient facilities instead of acquiring hospitals, expecting more procedures to move outside hospitals.

Management ran on a real-time "dashboard" tracking more than 800 metrics, from ICU bed space and operating-room turnover to teaching evaluations and publications, which Grossman called the organization's "sole source of truth". Reading the data, he saw that physicians were not fully documenting cases and so were not fully reimbursed; a major documentation effort helped turn around the finances. Length of stay became a north-star metric.

By 2024 NYU Langone had roughly $14 billion in revenue, up from $2 billion in 2007, 53,000 employees and more than 320 locations, and ranked No. 308 on the Fortune 500 by revenue. Fortune notes that an analysis of Turquoise Health data found its prices on eight common procedures ranked second-lowest among New York's five large systems, so growth was not just higher prices.

Revenue rose from about $2B in 2007 to roughly $14B in 2024, with 53,000 employees and more than 320 locations (per Fortune).

A joint medical school and hospital had no clear ownership of problems, so basic tasks stalled.

A single integrated entity under one CEO replaced divided school and hospital management.

Metrics were collected on one dashboard, making every department and doctor measurable.

A board of senior executives and donors gave sustained money and cover for hard personnel decisions.

Outpatient expansion rather than hospital acquisitions lowered staffing costs and raised margins.

A badly run institution can be fixed by one integrated management system: unify the units, measure everything on one dashboard, and hold people accountable to it.

Grossman and Langone handed over their roles to successors, with Fiona Druckenmiller succeeding Langone as chair, on September 1, 2025. Fortune cautions that NYU Langone benefits from Manhattan's wealth and a board of prominent financiers, but notes it has expanded into poorer, sicker markets to test whether the playbook travels. Fortune reported this with access granted by NYU Langone.