From ER Doctor to Executive Director — For Dr. Daniel Baker, It’s All About Putting People at the Center

For as long as Dr. Daniel Baker has lived in New York, he’s also worked at Lenox Hill Hospital. To him, he said, the two are “almost synonymous.”

It’s fitting, then, that as Lenox Hill’s executive director, Baker is thinking about the hospital on the scale of the city. He traces this perspective to the pandemic, when Lenox was absorbing patient surges from other hospitals in the Northwell Health system.

“Being in charge of so much during that time period was daunting,” he recalled. He’d been medical director for just a “short two years.” He had to make sure his patients and team members were staying safe when so much was unknown. Taking in patients from elsewhere was going to be a challenge, but the hospital had the capacity. “It required a lot of convincing, of the bigger importance of what healthcare really means and what being a hospital really means,” he said.

Lenox Hill’s team latched onto that deeper purpose and grew from the experience, said Baker. “Our patient population is much more diverse than our geographic center.” Nearly a third of the hospital’s patients are from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, he said. “We think a little bit bigger and wider about where our responsibility lies. And how we can make that a bigger impact.”

In 2022, Northwell Health unveiled plans for a new outpatient complex located on Third Avenue, between 76th and 77th streets, which Baker said is slated to open in 2026. Since 2019, Lenox Hill Hospital has also been planning to modernize and expand their building at Lexington Avenue and 77th Street, though not without pushback from community members. Baker is working on the two projects daily, and through the process, learned a lot about the politics of New York. “Things I didn’t necessarily think that I would be doing 17 years ago,” he said with a smile.

Lenox Hill was in a different place when Baker arrived in 2007. It was considered a “boutique hospital of choice for the rich, the famous and New Yorkers who seek pampering,” as one New York Times article from 2010 described. From Baker’s vantage point, the hospital had a “really neat network” of “really incredible physicians,” but there were few fully fledged programs. As an ER doctor, he practiced in the division of internal medicine — the standalone emergency department wasn’t fully established. But he saw the developing department as an “opportunity to push a little bit on that and see what we could do and how we could really grow.”

He later served as the associate medical director, and then vice chair, for the emergency medicine department. He then entered Northwell’s physician leadership development program and got his business degree.

In 2018, Dr. Jill Kalman — now Northwell’s Health’s chief medical officer — asked Baker to serve as medical director.

“I thought, ‘Okay, she’s lying to me. This couldn’t possibly come true,’” he recalled. “And my first day, when I sat on the other side of the desk, was almost surreal.”

After leading Lenox Hill through the worst of the pandemic, he was named the hospital’s executive director in 2022. He is also Northwell Health’s medical director of patient experience.

When Baker was growing up in Ohio and Michigan, he fell in love with science. “I was in AP biology and I was learning about physiology and just, I was enthralled,” he gushed.

As a kid, he fell sick with a disease that hadn’t been discovered yet. While shuttling in and out of physician’s offices and hospitals, “I saw that [being a doctor] was this wonderful opportunity to have this use of a science in a human interaction,” he said.

He continues to bring those two elements — science and human interaction — to his work every day. Thinking about patient-centered care is a big part of it, he said. “It is so much storytelling. It’s so much who we are as people and how we learn. That’s what I love about medicine.”