NYP Lawrence Hospital launches $65M cancer center

NewYork-Presbyterian’s Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville opened its “one-stop shop” cancer center and surgical suite at a ceremonial ribbon cutting on Nov. 21.

Hospital officials lauded the $65 million center as a way to elevate cancer care at the hospital while also strengthening the hospital’s ties to the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System.

“We believe in integrated cancer care at the highest level of quality that NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia can offer, and this center will provide us with that opportunity,” Dr. Steven J. Corwin, president and CEO of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, told a crowd packed into the first floor of the new wing.

Following a ceremony replete with doctors, hospital administrators and county dignitaries, hospital staff gave tours of the new 36,000-square-foot space. The four-level center, a collaboration between Columbia University Medical Center and NYP Lawrence Hospital, includes exam rooms; operating rooms with video integration systems; a satellite pharmacy; hematology lab; telemedicine capabilities; advanced radiotherapy systems; GE PET/Scan technology and a 4,710-square-foot rooftop garden.

The center will treat breast, lung, gynecologic, head and neck, gastrointestinal, prostate and bladder, blood and skin cancers.

Lawrence Hospital in 2014 joined the NewYork-Presbyterian Regional Hospital Network, which includes Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan. The new pavilion is the Bronxville hospital”™s latest major capital project following the completion and opening of a cardiac catheterization laboratory in April 2015.

Hospital officials said the oncology pavilion will also benefit from its tie-in to the NewYork-Presbyterian network, which includes access to clinical trials at Columbia University Medical Center and a physician team of cancer specialists in the New York-Presbyterian Medical Group Westchester and ColumbiaDoctors faculty practices.

“It connects NewYork-Presbyterian and its Manhattan flagships with Westchester,” Corwin told the Business Journal following the ribbon cutting. “Access to clinical trials, access to new medications, the ability for patients to receive care closer to their home. I think it fits all the reasonable things that we would like to see.”

The oncology pavilion adds 70 employees at the hospital, including 32 full-time staff members and four physicians from Columbia. 

Lawrence Hospital in 2008 was awarded a certificate of need by the state Department of Health for the cancer center. The project was approved by the Bronxville Planning Board in December 2012 and construction started in July 2013. The project was funded through a combination of borrowing, fundraising and hospital equity.

The center is coming online in a competitive health care market in the county, particularly for treatment of cancers. Both White Plains Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in West Harrison have opened new multimillion-dollar outpatient cancer centers in the past two years.

“Unfortunately there’s a lot of cancer, so we feel it was extremely important for us to have a cancer center as part of our health system that was based in our hospital in Westchester, both here at Lawrence and also (at NewYork-Presbyterian/Hudson Valley Hospital in Cortlandt Manor ) in the northern part of county,” Corwin said. “I wish there weren’t as much cancer, but there is, and we thought there was a real need for this in the community.”

The 288-bed community hospital in Bronxville was founded in 1909.