David B. Samadi

Born and raised in the Persian Jewish community of Iran, at age 15 Samadi and his younger brother left in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution. They continued their education in Belgium and the UK before coming to the United States where Samadi completed high school in Roslyn, New York. He attended Stony Brook University and earned his degree in biochemistry. He earned his M.D from S.U.N.Y., Stony Brook School of Medicine, Stony Brook, New York in 1994, and completed his postgraduate training in urology at Montefiore Medical Center and in urology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1996 and Montefiore Medical Center in 2000. He completed an oncology fellowship in urology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2001 and a robotic radical prostatectomy fellowship at Henri Mondor Hospital Creteil in France under the mentorship of Professor Claude Abbou in 2002.[1]

He first practiced at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, then joined the faculty of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in 2007 where he became the Vice Chair of the Department of Urology, and the Chief of Robotics and Minimally Invasive Surgery.[2] In 2012, he was the highest paid doctor in New York City, earning $7.6 million.[3]

He invented the Samadi Modified Advanced Robotic Treatment for prostate cancer surgeries. The technique was designed to replace open surgery with a minimally invasive alternative using the da Vinci Surgical System.[4]

In November 2019, Lenox Hill agreed to pay $12.3 million to settle a Medicare fraud lawsuit brought because Samadi performed multiple surgeries at the same time, leaving patients unsupervised by a urologist when he left one operating room for another; billing for unnecessary procedures; and inadequately supervised residents. The suit was the result of an investigation by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, who characterized the approach as "assembly line medicine" in violation of Medicare and hospital regulations.[5]

Patients were distressed to learn that Samadi was not actually performing their surgical procedures and was often not in the operating room, according to a Boston Globe investigation.[6]

He is currently affiliated with St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, NY.

• Official website