NYU Langone Health plans new multibillion-dollar Melville hospital, Long Island's first since 1980

NYU Langone Health’s plan for a new Melville hospital would reshape Long Island’s patient care landscape and significantly increase the health system's commitment to the region, policy experts told Newsday. 

The Manhattan-based system wants to build the Island’s first new hospital since 1980, spending billions of dollars on a more than 1 million-square-foot academic medical center.

Plans for the project, at 1 and 2 Huntington Quadrangle, include an approximately 500-bed hospital, emergency department, ambulatory services and research laboratories, said Dr. Alec C. Kimmelman, CEO of the health system and dean of its NYU Grossman School of Medicine. 

The medical school's Long Island campus would also move from Mineola to Melville, and NYU Langone would add housing for its students and employees.

“We’re going to be able to build something [in Melville] that I don't think we would have been able to build in Nassau,” Kimmelman told Newsday on Monday. “We want to have a state-of-the-art hospital of the future.”

The plan would stoke competition among Long Island’s health systems, including Northwell Health. Health policy experts told Newsday the investment represents a win for nearby residents, who would be able to access complex care closer to home. However, they said a state-of-the-art hospital alone would not make Long Island healthier.

“Hospitals are obviously a necessary part of the health care equation but they’re just one piece of the puzzle,” said David Sandman, president and CEO of the New York Health Foundation, a healthcare advocacy group and grant maker. “Things like primary care are what keep people healthy in the first place and help them manage chronic diseases like asthma and diabetes, so they don’t end up in the hospital.”

The plan would significantly alter one of Long Island’s most important commercial corridors along Route 110, while shifting the health system’s operations away from Mineola, where NYU Langone's presence has contributed to the village's revitalization. 

Kimmelman said NYU Langone Hospital — Long Island in Mineola, formerly Winthrop University Hospital, would remain open but have fewer inpatient beds. He said it was too soon to know how many beds would remain in Mineola and when construction of the Melville hospital could begin. 

However, the health system intends to invest in expanded specialty areas, such as cancer, cardiology and neurology, as well as emergency services at the Mineola hospital, which opened in 1896 as Nassau Hospital.

“We will change what is there. … But we’re going to continue to have a significant presence in Mineola,” said Kimmelman, who grew up in East Meadow.

NYU Langone will need multiple state and local government approvals to move forward, including from the state Department of Health and the Town of Huntington.

“They do face steep regulatory approvals, and they must prove there is an unmet need on Long Island for additional hospital care,” Sandman said. “What will receive equal scrutiny is what’s the plan for Winthrop? It’s not so easy to downsize the hospital and not face a lot of community opposition.”

NYU Langone had not submitted a certificate-of-need application to the state Department of Health as of Tuesday, spokeswoman Marissa Crary said. That review would be based on public need, character and competence of the operator and financial feasibility, she said.

Wendy Darwell, president and CEO of the Suburban Hospital Alliance, a regional trade group representing hospitals on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley, said the rare building of a new hospital campus would be “a boon” for the economy.

“It pushes every health system to be better when we have a competitive marketplace,” she said. Beyond construction jobs and permanent positions, the new campus is “going to keep more patients on Long Island, which is good for the economy.”

Competition for patients

The Melville hospital, which would sit on 45 acres, would represent more competition for patients, particularly with Northwell Health, the state’s largest private health system. 

The Island has 23 hospitals, including 12 in Suffolk County. The proposed site of the new NYU Langone hospital is about 4 miles from Northwell Health’s Plainview Hospital, 7 miles from Northwell’s Syosset Hospital and 8 miles from Northwell’s Huntington Hospital.

Northwell and NYU Langone have clashed over their quest to attract patients, including in a 2024 lawsuit in which NYU Langone alleged Northwell had used NYU’s “distinct purple color” in its ads to confuse patients. 

Northwell Health and Stony Brook Medicine did not respond to requests for comment about the proposal. 

The six-hospital Catholic Health system, which operates St. Joseph Hospital in Bethpage, 6 miles from the proposed Melville site, “remains focused on advancing its own growth strategy, expanding access to high-quality, compassionate care,” spokeswoman Kate LeCardi said.

The Melville hospital will offer patients a new place to access care and also strengthen NYU Langone’s position in negotiations with insurers, who may have a harder time excluding the system from its network, said Martine Hackett, who chairs the Department of Population Health at Hofstra University.

“People will vote with their feet,” Hackett said. “They will take their insurance where they get the best quality of care.”

But she questioned spending billions on a new facility when so much of patients’ health outcomes are determined by other factors, such as access to nutritious food, clean air and safe housing. 

“It’s a sick care system, and that’s what this perpetuates,” Hackett said. “We’re going to invest this money for when people are ill, but we know most healthcare happens outside the ecosystem.”

Kimmelman, NYU Langone's CEO, raised a similar point in his interview with Newsday, noting the system has received recent recognition for preventing hospitalizations and treats patients at more than 120 physician practices, from Valley Stream to Bridgehampton. 

NYU Langone Health has more than 50,000 employees — including more than 13,000 on Long Island. It consists of seven hospitals, more than 320 outpatient sites and reported operating revenue of $15.4 billion in its most recent fiscal year, which ended Aug. 31, 2025.

Nationally significant

Union officials representing workers at NYU Langone’s Mineola hospital said workers would be protected in the event of any major staffing changes resulting from development of the new campus. More than 1,200 workers at the hospital are represented by 1199SEIU, including nursing assistants, dietary workers and housekeepers.

“Our strong union contract helps protect impacted 1199SEIU members with being placed in similar positions — if needed — at another NYU Langone facility if positions are reduced at the Mineola hospital," Michael Ashby, executive vice president of 1199SEIU, said in a statement issued to Newsday.

If it moves forward, a multi-billion dollar project would represent one of the most expensive hospital construction projects in the country, said Scott Becker, publisher of Becker’s Hospital Review. Last year, there were at least 15 hospital projects of at least $1 billion, Becker’s reported.

Health systems often find it more cost effective to build new rather than to retrofit existing buildings, and many see modernizing as critical to attracting top doctors, he said, citing Stanford Health Care as one example.

“The money spent on construction seems so crazy, yet in trying to become the destination place in the area for patient care, for research, for recruiting the best doctors, it has ultimately worked out for a lot of these places,” he said.

NYU Langone has grown substantially on Long Island in the past decade. The historically Manhattan-based system first formed an affiliation with the 591-bed Winthrop University Hospital in 2016 before acquiring the hospital in 2019. Last year, the system acquired the 306-bed Long Island Community Hospital in East Patchogue, renaming it NYU Langone Hospital — Suffolk.

In the past few years, NYU Langone officials said the system explored building a new hospital at the Nassau Community College campus in Uniondale or the Canon U.S.A. headquarters in Melville because of space constraints in downtown Mineola.

"We are less constrained here. We can build an entire campus here that's going to have the school, to have research, to allow us to expand over time," Kimmelman said. "This is going to be our forever hospital for the next 100 years."

Newsday's Dorothy Guadagno and Laura Mann contributed research to this article.