Hackensack announces physician agreement with Georgetown

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Hackensack University Medical Center announced today a physicians’ services agreement with MedStar Georgetown University Hospital that will bring Hackensack’s blood and marrow stem cell transplant program to cancer patients in the Washington, D.C., area while accelerating research to improve outcomes for transplant patients.Hackensack said its John Theurer Cancer Center has one of the world’s largest blood and marrow stem cell transplant programs, with nearly 5,000 transplants performed since the program began in 1990. Hackensack physicians in that program are members of Regional Cancer Care Associates LLC; its president, Dr. Andrew L. Pecora, said until now, the group worked entirely in New Jersey. Through this partnership, the group’s physicians will provide care and medical oversight for the transplant program at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital.

“We were approached by Georgetown because they had had a transplant program that, for a variety of reasons, had been discontinued,” Pecora said. “We wanted to do this because we have an affiliation with the National Cancer Institute that has been ongoing for three years, where we are really on the cutting edge of transforming how you do transplants” to improve outcomes for patients.

The partnership will enable HackensackUMC physicians to be credentialed at MedStar Georgetown, and be considered for membership in the Georgetown Lombardi cancer center and for faculty appointments at Georgetown and its oncology program.

Pecora said RCCA “is the largest oncology provider in New Jersey — we have nearly 100 physicians who are all practicing together” as one company. He said 30 of them work at Hackensack’s John Theurer Cancer Center “but they are independent doctors who own and operate RCCA, and it is RCCA physicians that have the contract to open up the transplant program at Georgetown. This is an extension of the HackensackUMC program, and from an economic perspective, the physicians will get the economic benefit of providing more transplantation services.”

Pecora said RCCA also plans to open offices in Pennsylvania.