New Compliance Officer
Joins NYU Medical Center

As a healthcare organization, NYU Medical Center carries out its mission of patient care, scientific research, and medical education in one of the most highly regulated and administratively complex of all industries. To help ensure that its employees successfully meet these rigorous requirements, NYU has a longstanding corporate compliance program.

Thomas Feuerstein, newly-appointed VP of Audit and Compliance

To further enhance this program, the Medical Center recently appointed Thomas Feuerstein, C.P.A., as Vice President of Audit and Compliance. Feuerstein comes to NYU from Deloitte & Touche, where he was the National Director of Healthcare Internal Audit Services. Previously, he spent eight years with New York­Presbyterian Hospital, where he established a system-wide compliance and internal audit function.

What is compliance? “It’s about doing the right things for the right reasons,” says Feuerstein. “To do this, we all need to know the rules, understand how they affect our activities, and apply that knowledge to every transaction that we have responsibility for.”

“When organizations such as ours have compliance problems,” adds Feuerstein, “it isn’t necessarily because management broke the rules on purpose. It’s usually because a business process was not established properly at the outset, that critical information was not communicated, or that some important process fell apart and nobody caught it. Compliance is about communication, training, and monitoring performance. It’s about continually improving all business processes.”

The Office of Compliance serves both the School of Medicine and NYU Hospitals Center. Its staff includes Shelia Furjanic, Director of Hospital Compliance; Gretchen Segado, Director of Physician Billing Compliance; and Ellen Hyman-Browne, Research Compliance Director.

Feuerstein says that he and the compliance staff look forward to working with each department to strengthen policies, procedures, and business processes throughout the Medical Center. He encourages employees to contact his office if they have any concerns about particular compliance issues. The office also has created a Compliance Help Line (866-NYU-1212). Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it is managed by an outside company with multilingual operators. Callers need not identify themselves; their comments are forwarded to the Office of Compliance so that it can work to resolve the issue in question.