On the opening day of the Entertainment Community Fund’s Samuel J. Friedman Health Center for the Performing Arts, medical director Dr. Jason Kindt and sports medicine doctor Ramon J. Pesigan hovered in the background as the Fund’s board members, then chair Brian Stokes Mitchell, then-Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and more gathered for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. The senior medical director from Mount Sinai (the center’s medical partner) caught Kindt and Pesigan hugging the wall and approached them. “Someday,” he told the two physicians, “this health center will be all about you, because people come to see a doctor, not a health center, and once people get to know you, it will grow.”
Seven years later, the practice has grown — into a necessary resource for the arts community in New York City and, as of June, a Tony Award-honored facility.
Leaders of the Fund conceived of the idea for the Friedman Health Center in 2014, aiming to provide high-quality medical care to arts workers, regardless of their insurance status. The Fund had been running the Al Hirschfeld Free Health Center since 1999, under which one full-time physician and a roster of volunteer physicians provided free care to uninsured arts professionals. “When the Affordable Care Act came into place and everybody who was able to get health insurance was supposed to, it didn’t make sense to run a free health center anymore,” said the Fund’s chief operating officer, Barbara S. Davis. But it also didn’t make sense to discontinue care entirely.
“We knew there were always going to be people in and out of insurance, and we saw needs change,” Davis said. “There became an increasing need for access to quality primary care, even for people who had insurance.”
Over the next three years, the Fund identified a medical partner (Mount Sinai Doctors), a space (the floor above the Fund offices at 729 Seventh Avenue, by a sheer stroke of luck) and staff (Kindt and Pesigan, to start).
