The leaders of New York’s most prestigious medical institutions take home millions of dollars in pay each year, as do many of the doctors who work for them. Crain’s latest lists spotlight the region’s top-compensated executives and doctors in each group.
NYU Langone Health CEO Robert I. Grossman is the highest-paid among hospital executives, and it’s not all that close. His total compensation was $22.8 million in 2023, the latest year for which data is available and the reference point for all salaries mentioned in this story. Grossman also topped last year’s list but won’t be in the rankings much longer: He’s set to retire in August after 18 years leading the NYU system.
Next on the executives list is Philip Ozuah, president and CEO of Montefiore Medicine, which presides over the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Health System’s many hospitals and ambulatory sites across New York. Ozuah’s 2023 compensation was $16.4 million.
New York-Presbyterian Hospital president and CEO Steven J. Corwin is next on the list with annual compensation totalling $14.6 million. Corwin, a 2020 Crain’s Hall of Fame inductee, has previously ranked at the top of the highest-paid executives list.
It should be noted that this year’s editions of the highest-paid hospital professionals are not to be compared apples-to-apples with previous Crain’s rankings, since these lists use a different definition of total compensation. In the past, the figures were based on cash compensation that included salary, bonuses and other reportable pay but excluded retirement, deferred compensation and nontaxable benefit. This year’s lists include all of the above compensation.
Two other NYU Langone leaders — Andrew W. Brotman and Daniel J. Widawsky, both executive vice presidents — closed out the top five. However, Widawsky, who collected $12 million in 2023 as CFO, left NYU last January and returned to the financial sector.
As for the highest compensated doctors, it pays to work at Catholic Health’s St. Francis Hospital and NYU Langone. Those two systems cut the six largest paychecks to doctors in 2023.
Richard Shlofmitz, chairman of cardiology at St. Francis, topped the list with $8.5 million. The hospital’s chief of electrophysiology, Joseph Levine, ranked No. 2 with $6.8 million.
NYU Langone surgery department chairs John Golfinos (neurosurgery), Eduardo D. Rodriguez (plastic surgery), Joseph Zuckerman (orthopedic surgery) and Robert Montgomery (general surgery and transplants) ranked next with pay ranging from $5.3 million to $6.6 million.
For these lists, the “New York area” includes New York City and Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties in New York, plus Bergen, Essex, Hudson and Union counties in New Jersey.
