A regional hospital group is exploring its appeal options after a state Health Department board recently approved Memorial Sloan-Kettering”™s plan to build a $130-million regional outpatient cancer treatment center in Harrison.
The state Public Health and Health Planning Council at its Oct. 6 meeting voted to approve a certificate of need to permit Memorial Sloan-Kettering to build an approximately 100,000-square-foot treatment center at 500 Westchester Ave. Officials at the Manhattan hospital expect to begin construction next spring and to open the facility in 2015.
The project is opposed by an alliance of area hospitals and physicians who claim the center”™s added oncology services are not needed and would create excess capacity in this region while posing an economic threat to other cancer-care providers in the Westchester market.
Nine hospitals in Westchester County have oncology practices, according to the Northern Metropolitan Hospital Association (NorMet), and most are within 10 miles of the proposed Harrison site.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering officials have said the Harrison clinic will serve its patients in Westchester, Connecticut and the Hudson Valley who now travel to Manhattan for treatment and help meet an anticipated growing need for cancer care services in the future. Expected to create 140 jobs, the clinic would be part of the hospital”™s regional care network, which includes an outpatient center at Phelps Memorial Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, three centers on Long Island and one in New Jersey.
Kevin W. Dahill, president and CEO of NorMet, which represents 30 hospitals in the seven-county Hudson Valley region, called the council”™s decision “disappointing on many levels.” He urged state Health Commissioner Nirav R. Shah, who has the final say on the project certificate, to “scrap” the council”™s recommendation and postpone a decision “until an accurate and comprehensive needs and impact analysis is completed.”
Dahill said precedents where the health commissioner reversed the planning council”™s decision are “few and far between.”
He said state health planners initially undercounted the number of linear accelerators ”“ used in radiation treatment for cancer patients ”“ that are operated by or approved for Westchester hospitals, reporting eight accelerators when there are 10. Health planners said 12 accelerators are needed to serve patients in the county.
But the state does not count accelerators at private physician offices, where cancer patients increasingly receive ambulatory care, Dahill said. There are five privately held accelerators in the county, according to figures provided NorMet by the Westchester County Medical Society, an ally in the effort to block the Sloan-Kettering project. The county has 15 accelerators at hospital and physician facilities, said Dahill, and the Sloan-Kettering facility would add to the excess capacity.
The state”™s failure to include private accelerators in its methodology to determine health care needs is “a very significant flaw” that could have led the council to make “an ill-informed decision,” Dahill said.
The state”™s accelerator miscount suggests that “this was a very superficial review” of the project, said Dahill, who also is president and CEO of the Nassau-Suffolk Hospital Council.
“This was really an effort to fast-track that application.”
Dahill said the council”™s project approval runs counter to the state”™s “rightsizing” health care policy and effort to reduce excess capacity in hospitals and other facilities and cut health care costs.
