New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System recently unveiled its new family caregiving center to improve how patients’ loved ones are recognized and supported in their roles.

The health system announced the opening of its Steven S. Elbaum Family Center for Caregiving in late May. The journey to the facility’s launch has been more than a decade in the making, according to Allison Applebaum, professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Applebaum will lead the new facility.

The facility is designed to address growing gaps of unmet family caregiver needs that are having lasting impacts, she said.

“This is really the culmination of work and a vision building over the past 15 years,” Applebaum told Hospice News. “Support for caregivers is very limited, and there was no targeted support services for caregivers within cancer centers. Models of care were relying heavily on family caregivers to shoulder tremendous responsibilities that we as health care providers have a responsibility to support.”

Applebaum joined Mount Sinai after previously serving as founding director of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Caregivers Clinic. She was instrumental in developing the innovative program in 2011, which offered targeted psychosocial care to family caregivers of patients with cancer from diagnosis through bereavement. The program has helped to pave the way for development of a larger model for expanded community-based psychosocial support, including Mount Sinai’s new center, according to Applebaum.

Launched in January 2025 as part of Mount Sinai’s clinical services, the center houses its caregivers clinic and in May opened to provide individualized psychosocial care to the patients’ parents, partners, children, siblings and friends.

Mount Sinai is working in tandem with the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) to develop a national caregiving program with business plans and care models that can be used by health care systems across the country, Applebaum indicated. Among the main goals is to establish a national framework during the next six months and make it available for any program interested in developing this type of support, she said.

The new center’s aim to transform caregiver resources includes four key initiatives such as:

• Developing scalable support models for nationwide implementation
• Pursuing innovative caregiving research
• Training the next generation of caregiving scientists
• Advocating for policy reforms that recognize caregivers as essential health care partners

“We’re really building a much broader, larger program that would have many components to it including research, training, advocacy and dissemination, as well as the clinical service,” Applebaum said. “What we’ve built here is taking a model and expanding it to support family caregivers of patients with all chronic and life-limiting illnesses, disabilities and mental health challenges. One of the most important parts of our business model for the clinic is that caregivers become patients of the health care system if they aren’t already a patient. This allows us to bill insurance and generate revenue, which contributes to the sustainability of the service.”

Research from Mount Sinai’s new center will help to inform national guidelines and policy recommendations, with a drive to “fundamentally reshape” how the health care systems support caregivers, the organization stated in a statement shared with Hospice News.

The health system is among the largest academic medical systems in the New York City area and includes more than 600 research and clinical labs, a school of nursing and a school of medicine and graduate education.

Mount Sinai Health System’s footprint includes roughly 9,000 primary and specialty care clinicians and 11 joint-venture centers across the five boroughs of New York City, as well as in Westchester and Long Island, New York and Florida. The health system provides hospice, behavioral health, emergency services and primary, palliative and home-based care, among other services.

“We look at this caregivers clinic in many ways as preventative medicine [and] profoundly beneficial for better outcomes,” Applebaum said. “Caregivers feel supported when they have less distress. They’re less likely to rely on emergency rooms for care, and they’re more likely to feel like they can handle medical challenges on their own or reach out for support to nurses. We need guidelines that transform the experience of families. We have a very, very long way to go, and I hope our research and efforts bring identification of caregivers, and offer those caregivers psychosocial support to become standards of our care.”