In June, New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health appointed Samir Taneja, MD, as the system chair of urology and chair of the Smith Institute for Urology.
Also serving as senior vice president, Dr. Taneja came to Northwell after 29 years with New York City-based NYU Langone Health, where he held the positions of vice chair of the department of urology and director of the division of urologic oncology, according to a June 5 news release from Northwell.
Tasked with unifying urology services across the health system, Dr. Taneja spoke with Becker’s about his top priorities at Northwell and how he aims to “repair the cultural bias” surrounding men’s health.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: How do you envision transforming Northwell Health’s urology service line?
Dr. Samir Taneja: Historically Northwell Urology has been known for technological innovation and adopting new approaches to disease, which is very in line with what I’ve tried to do in my career before coming to Northwell. The opportunity at Northwell is to approach disease in a more interdisciplinary fashion. That’s the future of care. Whether it be for malignancy, kidney stones, reconstructive efforts: trying to understand the whole patient rather than simply the individual disease process. Building interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary teams that approach a single disease process is something I’m very passionate about. It elevates care, it enhances the patient experience and probably results in better disease-related outcomes.
Interdisciplinary doesn’t just mean, for example, a medical oncologist and a surgeon collaborating. It takes into account the whole patient picture. From the standpoint of physicians, you might incorporate a cardiologist or a psychiatrist to better understand the individual needs of the patient. It also incorporates disease approaches, as [care is not] one size fits all for the same disease. Prostate cancer is a great example of that, because prostate cancer patients have options for treating their disease that range from doing nothing to doing very radical treatments. Even in other disease processes, there may be options for management that mean you might approach a disease with a second-best approach if it’s a better fit for that patient and more likely to result in a good outcome.
That’s where I really want to enhance care at Northwell: individualizing care for the patient and building a multidisciplinary approach around them. The other part of it, because of Northwell’s history with technology integration and innovation, there’s a real opportunity to partner with scientists and industry to test new approaches to disease management, to allow technological advances in device development and artificial intelligence, and to partner with innovators in those fields to see if we can shift the paradigm for managing disease. Northwell is a great place to do that because of its history, but also because of its expansive network and the huge patient population that it serves.
Q: How do you plan to navigate aligning multidisciplinary care teams within Northwell’s planned urologic centers of excellence?
ST: I could be described as anti-silo. Everyone I’ve met at Northwell so far is very eager to collaborate in patient care. But when you have such an expansive healthcare network — our network stretches from the tip of Long Island all the way up to Poughkeepsie — you can imagine that within each regional market, cultures are different, practice standards are different and the history is very different. One has to navigate a very tricky political slope where you’re trying to inspire people in different regions to buy into the system-level vision, but also respecting their culture, their history, and not coming in and ripping the roots out.
The real opportunity for advancing the management of disease is that if we come up with new approaches to disease, it should be available across the system and it should be standardized. Everybody should be working towards the common goal. That will be a critical challenge in implementing some of the vision I’m talking about. I want it so that if somebody walks into an office for Northwell Urology in Connecticut, the care they receive will be no different than if they walk in in Bay Shore, Long Island, or anywhere else in the network.
The way I envision doing that is building system-level interdisciplinary programs. But how do you get stakeholders to talk? Well, you start with and center on the patient. The one thing that different disciplines have in common is their desire for the patient to do well. [Interdisciplinary care] requires people to sit down, communicate and come to a consensus about the right approach and how we can improve the care of patients through innovation.
My hope is that I can get people to talk, but sometimes what that requires is inspirational leaders. I’ve learned that if you go in and tell people to change the way they do things, they’re unlikely to do it and more likely to resent you. On the other hand, if you walk in to create something and you lead by example, you may inspire them. They may be convinced to join the effort based on their own decision process. That’s the way we have to do it, but it’s going to take getting critical stakeholders together to talk and agree that this effort will advance the care of patients.
Q: What hospital and health system leaders should know about elevating awareness around men’s health issues?
ST: Prostate cancer is a major issue for men and has got a lot of press recently with President Biden’s diagnosis. We do hear these stories that men ignore their prostates and they come out with very advanced disease for what’s ultimately a very curable disease, if it’s caught early.
On a larger scale, though, men’s health has a huge implication for healthcare delivery and for the healthcare system as we go into the next few decades, and it comes from the idea that women are very different from men. That’s not an earth-shattering statement, but with regard to healthcare, they are different. I used to host a men’s health show on Sirius XM and we would get call-ins from people with questions. It was always the wives that called about their husbands.
What I learned, and what I think a lot of people already know, is that men really don’t seek healthcare until they’re broken, until something’s wrong. They’re not very good at preventive care. They’re not very good at viewing their health in a very holistic manner. The opportunity with men’s health is to repair that cultural bias. If you can prevent disease, you will ultimately reduce healthcare expenditure over time, rather than treating people when they come in with a massive [myocardial infarction] or when they have a stroke. If you could avoid it through good cardiac health and prevention you would improve overall healthcare outcomes and reduce cost.
The idea for men’s health that I’m hoping to promote at Northwell is that we will bring men in for the diseases or the things they care about. We’ll have an open portal, a Men’s Health Initiative, where men may seek care for their prostate enlargement and urinary symptoms or low testosterone level. Once they’re in the door, they will be exposed to comprehensive care and that might include prostate cancer screening, if appropriate. It might include cardiac evaluation or education about weight loss, improving their diet or improving their lifestyle, smoking cessation — all the things that men will not walk in the door to seek. We’re going to try to expose them through the conduit of men’s health.
If we can achieve that across our system and duplicate that model, it will have a huge impact on healthcare in general. [The Men’s Health Initiative] is very in line with Northwell’s community initiatives of trying to be a leader in treating the whole patient and all the issues that affect them beyond simply, you know, what they show up in the ER for.
Q: What are your top priorities as you move into this new role?
ST: They all fall upon the idea of system integration. Michael Dowling talks about this concept of systemness, meaning we do things that are good for the system.
My goal is to really draw the system together to elevate the stature and national visibility of Northwell Urology. This will also enable us to be more productive in innovation, research and clinical trials. I want to leverage this large network to be more effective with academic endeavors. Northwell is already, from a size and an expansion perspective, probably where most healthcare systems will want to be 10 years from now.
If we’re already where we need to be, then there’s an opportunity to figure out how academic urology works in our system. How do you keep quality equal across all the sites? How do you leverage this large network to be more effective in research, more effective in measuring outcomes, more effective in clinical trials? Those are really my top priorities.
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