Hospital for Special Surgery

Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) is a New York–based academic medical center that has been doing one thing since 1863: musculoskeletal health. That's orthopedics, rheumatology, and the research pipeline behind them - more than 30,000 surgical procedures a year across facilities in Manhattan, the greater New York metro area, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Florida. The operation has held the U.S. News & World Report #1 ranking for orthopedics for 16 consecutive years and a parallel Newsweek distinction for five. For a security team, the threat model here is healthcare's classic pressure cooker: high-value patient data at scale, a sprawling clinical-and-research environment with 225+ dedicated researchers at the HSS Research Institute, and a network footprint that spans multiple states. The institution is affiliated with Weill Cornell Medical College, which means academic and research systems sit alongside production clinical infrastructure - each with different access patterns, compliance obligations, and attack surfaces. Operationally, HSS is a Magnet-recognized facility that publishes its own peer-reviewed journal, signaling an organization that takes rigor seriously and generates a steady volume of sensitive data - clinical, research, and intellectual property. Security work here involves defending a hybrid clinical-research environment where uptime and data integrity aren't abstract metrics but direct patient outcomes and research continuity. The scale is real, the data is consequential, and the regulatory landscape is non-negotiable.