This year we are very proud that Michal A. Elovitz, MD, a renowned expert in maternal-fetal medicine and founding Director of Mount Sinai’s Women’s Biomedical Research Institute, will lead a wide-ranging initiative in women’s health research, supported by a $3 million gift from the Pershing Square Foundation. The effort will focus on four important, and understudied, areas—endometriosis, cervical cancer, preeclampsia, and menopause.
In further efforts to advance women’s health, a team of physician-scientists led by Stephanie V. Blank, MD, launched a series of clinical trials to test promising treatments for gynecologic cancers, including antibody-drug conjugates, a new and highly targeted approach. In an interdisciplinary study, Katharine McCarthy, PhD, MPH, found that people who develop diabetes after pregnancy were significantly less likely to be able to bring it under control if they had experienced gestational diabetes mellitus, especially if they were Black or Hispanic.
With Rachel Meislin, MD, I took part in a multicenter, systemic study that filled in a longstanding gap in clinical knowledge—finding that low-dose vaginal misoprostol is the safest and most effective method for cervical ripening to induce labor in outpatient settings.
A breakthrough study led by Tatyana Kushner, MD, found that women with liver disease who underwent standard in vitro fertilization treatment showed no statistically significant differences in the rates of conception, pregnancy loss, or live births compared to women without liver disease.
Our advanced and compassionate care is at the center of all we do. At the Mount Sinai -Rainbow Clinic, the first of its kind in the United States, a multidisciplinary team responded to the special circumstances and sensitivities of parents who have experienced prenatal loss, including a patient who lost her first child at 22 weeks then joyfully gave birth to a full-term baby boy.
To improve the quality of care, reduce readmission rates, improve the patient experience, and relieve the burden on health care providers, we expanded post-discharge phone calls to include obstetric patients following a vaginal birth—who account for 60 percent of our 14,000 yearly deliveries. This effort was led by Toni A. Stern, MD, and Erin Figueroa, MSN, RN.
Finally, the Woman to Woman program marked 20 years of supporting people with gynecologic cancers—giving the gift of hope and understanding to thousands of patients. The peer-support program began at Mount Sinai with an ovarian cancer survivor who wanted to reach out and support others, and has inspired similar groups around the nation.
We invite you to explore our 2024 Specialty Report to learn more about Mount Sinai and our commitment to research innovation, physician training, and the advanced, compassionate, and equitable care of our patients.
Joanne Stone, MD, MS, Chair and Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai