When hepatologist Frances Lee, MD, packed up her FibroScan and began seeing patients at Mount Sinai’s REACH Program in April 2025, it signified a dramatic new course for treating people with alcohol-related liver disease (ALD). It made Mount Sinai a leading site for the treatment of ALD in the New York metropolitan region, and one of a handful in the country with a comprehensive center for addressing the sizable population of patients with both liver disease and alcohol addiction.
“Through my co-location within REACH, we’ve created a destination where patients with alcohol addiction and ALD can now get multispecialty, wraparound services,” says Dr. Lee, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Liver Diseases) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who was recently named Director of the Alcohol-Associated Liver Disease Program. “I want us to become a leader nationally in setting the standard of care for alcohol-related liver disease, and our new combined clinic is a step in that direction.”
Given its focus on multidisciplinary approaches to ALD, the Alcohol-Associated Liver Disease Program fits perfectly with REACH. In addition, the Program has forged partnerships with the Addiction Institute of Mount Sinai, which offers detoxification services and personalized and group therapy, and with endocrinology, surgical services, and transplant hepatology within the Mount Sinai Health System.
Moreover, the Program is contributing to a research initiative under the Division of Liver Diseases’ MASH Center of Excellence that’s studying metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis through the biobanking of patients with ALD—making it one of a few institutions in the country prospectively following patients with ALD.
At Mount Sinai's REACH clinic, screening technologies like FibroScan are complemented by considering metabolic risk factors and duration of alcohol bingeing to stratify risk for ALD and fibrosis.
“This ongoing work,” elaborates Dr. Lee, “will enable us to answer crucial questions about the progression of ALD across time, why some patients advance faster than others, and what biomarkers exist to enhance our understanding of the disease process.” Notably, at the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) Congress in May 2025, Dr. Lee presented her novel research showing that ALD screening may be enhanced by considering both metabolic risk factors and duration of alcohol bingeing to stratify risk for ALD and fibrosis.
The REACH Program, for its part, is located just one floor below Dr. Lee’s office at The Mount Sinai Hospital’s uptown campus in Manhattan. REACH is part of Internal Medicine Associates in the Division of General Internal Medicine. It is a primary care center for patients with substance use disorders and individuals living with hepatitis C virus infection. REACH’s comprehensive services include addiction counseling and treatment to reduce alcohol-related craving through medications such as Vivitrol (naltrexone), a highly effective injectable that’s only administered at addiction medicine clinics. Additional services include hepatitis C screening and treatment, medications for opioid use disorder including long-acting injectables, integrated behavioral health services, and support groups.
Staffing the site is a seasoned team of physicians, a nurse practitioner, nurses, and social workers who take a harm-reduction approach to patient care. Also integral to the success of the REACH Program are navigators and community health workers who coordinate care and guide patients through the complexities of the health care system. They also tend to important details such as ensuring patients have the transportation to get to and from their clinic appointments.
The REACH team includes, from left, Director Jeffrey Weiss, PhD, a psychologist; psychiatrist Daniel Suter, MD; Dr. Lee; patient navigator Uchenna Ijomah; and Linda Wang, MD, a primary care physician and addiction specialist.
Now, with Dr. Lee’s monthly visits, REACH has a hepatologist on staff who adds a critical layer of care by ensuring patients are treated not just for their symptoms, but for the underlying cause of their alcohol-related liver disease. This may involve a thoughtfully tailored program that includes medication, counseling, and expert referrals where needed. For Dr. Lee, who joined Mount Sinai in 2024 after completing a transplant hepatology and gastroenterology fellowship in San Francisco and an internal residency in Atlanta, a top priority is changing the conversation with her patients away from just liver transplantation.
“In the case of patients deemed not to be good candidates for transplantation, I’ve worked to shift the focus from ‘can we get you a new liver’ to ‘how can we maximize what you have right now and ensure you never have to go to the hospital,’” she explains. “It can be a breath of fresh air for patients to have a hepatologist who discusses how they can lead a comfortable life by pursuing options other than just transplantation.”
If a new liver is the only option, however, Dr. Lee wants to even the odds for patients whose cases come before transplant committees that judge their eligibility. To that end, she has set a goal of achieving and standardizing such an extraordinary level of care within REACH that alcohol addiction does not figure as a dominant issue in the panel’s discussion of a patient’s candidacy for transplantation.
Beyond significantly widening her field of practice, Dr. Lee is well aware that her novel new partnership with REACH is strengthening her own skills and acumen as a hepatologist.
“I firmly believe doctors only get better when they reach outside their own little silos and are willing to collaborate with others,” she says. “I also think that working as closely as I now do with addiction medicine enables me to bring that knowledge to other hepatologists. In the end, we all become better specialists.”