The new East Hampton Emergency Room is by far the most important addition to East Hampton’s health care landscape, ever. Dr. William Wertheim, executive vice president at Stony Brook Medicine, reported to the town board in August that the volume of patients seen at the new E.R. has grown steadily since the facility opened in May 2025. He went on to say, as reported in The Star, that “there was a significant unmet need for emergency medical care on the South Fork, and that many people are simply going without care.”
The reality is that even with the new E.R., many people are going without comprehensive health care on the East End due to the lack of physicians here, including specialty physicians like cardiologists, surgeons, pulmonologists, and others. It’s a painfully familiar story for many businesses and organizations out here: The high cost of housing on the South Fork makes it challenging to recruit and retain physicians whether they are specialists or primary care doctors.
In 2012 I was asked by Southampton Hospital’s then-chief executive to conduct an analysis of the need for physicians in East Hampton. I collaborated with the planning department at Stony Brook Medicine to dig deep into data, including counts of patients admitted to all New York State hospitals from ZIP codes on the East End, as well as the diagnoses that contributed to the hospitalization of those patients. The analysis identified the types and number of specialty physicians needed to care for patients here. For example, the research showed that there is a high number of cardiac patients from East Hampton, suggesting a need for cardiologists here.
The local data were also compared to national planning guidelines to confirm conclusions regarding the types and number of specialty physicians needed in East Hampton. The most pressing need was for cardiologists, general surgeons, obstetrics/gynecologists, ophthalmologists, and orthopedic surgeons.
Results of the data analysis were presented to the board of directors of Southampton Hospital and to the executive management at Stony Brook Medicine. Sadly, although our population in East Hampton has grown, the availability of specialty physicians here is about the same as it was 14 years ago. Yet the need for physicians not only exists still — it is increasing.
Stony Brook Medicine is not the only medical center that must recruit doctors to high-cost-of-living areas such as East Hampton. Medical centers in California seek to recruit doctors to equally expensive communities, places like Santa Barbara and Monterey. Here on the East Coast, doctors in Massachusetts are recruited to serve the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Medical centers in all these regions set physician compensation at levels that enable their doctors to afford to live comfortably in or near the communities in which they work. They all use information obtained from the Economic
Research Institute (erieri.com), which provides community-specific cost-of-living data, to set physician compensation.
Here, conversely, over the past 25 years, six mostly young primary care physicians were recruited, but their stays were brief. They subsequently departed from Amagansett and Montauk. And a seventh young doctor departed after Labor Day.
They left practices here primarily due to the unaffordability of life in East Hampton. Doctors leaving because housing and other costs are too high here — consider that for a moment. Most of these doctors lived west of East Hampton and also had to endure onerous commutes driving to and from work, daily. Except for Dr. Gavino Mapula, who retired, all of the other recently departed physicians left practices here to live and work in more affordable communities.
The East Hampton E.R. is terrific, and this community is grateful to Stony Brook Medicine’s leadership for their assistance in constructing and staffing the facility. But Stony Brook Medicine can and should do much more to provide East End patients with access to primary care and specialty care.
As Suffolk County’s only academic medical center and a public institution, it has an obligation to ensure access to health care on the East End. A patient discharged from the new E.R. with a referral to see a specialty physician like a cardiologist or urologist is already deeply concerned about their health. On top of that concern, they must confront that long drive to Southampton, or beyond, to see a specialist.
We have a growing and aging population in East Hampton, and the research shows the community’s physician needs are unmet. Dr. Wertheim told the town board that the new E.R. has addressed the unmet need for emergency care. Now, Stony Brook Medicine’s leadership should work aggressively to address the longstanding unmet need for specialty and primary care physicians. They should recognize the high cost of living in East Hampton and, like similar medical centers, use data from the Economic Research Institute to set compensation at levels that enable physicians to live near where they work.
Stony Brook Medicine might well argue that the resulting compensation differential is not offset by health insurance payments, which is true. But that argument falls short since health industry data clearly indicate that most physicians generate revenue for medical centers far in excess of their compensation when they refer patients for lab and radiology tests and refer patients for special procedures and surgeries.
The Stony Brook Medicine strategic plan calls on the hospital network to offer “the right care close to home.” It’s time for it to act according to that plan. Stony Brook Medicine can expand on the success of the new E.R. and do more for East End patients by carving out the funds to provide proper and convenient access to specialty and primary care physicians and other health care services in East Hampton.
Jay Levine, a Montauk resident, is a retired health care management consultant who recently completed 20 years of service on the board of directors of Southampton Hospital. For over 30 years he worked with medical schools, hospitals, and medical centers throughout the United States, including the National Institutes of Health, where, among other things, he addressed physician compensation.