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OP-ED: Windber Medical Center making a difference in cancer care

By Nick Jacobs 4 min read

As the population of Johnstown continued to cascade downward after the 1977 flood, Mercy Health System decided to discontinue its association with Johnstown’s Mercy Hospital. This happened in 1992 and, as a relatively new vice president with limited experience in health care administration, I remember very clearly filling a three-ring notebook with rejection letters from job applications I had filed at other hospitals across the country.

It was during this six-month-long transition period that I began to recognize a type of desperation that can only be felt by a 40 year-old who is facing ongoing expenses for two graduate and two undergraduate degrees for you and your family members, plus a home mortgage, two car payments, and a myriad of other normal expenses with no job on the immediate horizon.

Late one afternoon, I made a call to a political liaison from the Hospital Association of Pennsylvania (HAP) and explained my challenge. After a chance meeting with then Lieut. Gov. Mark Singel, the HAP administrator called me back and said, “If you’re good enough to be endorsed by the lieutenant governor, you’re good enough for me to recommend you for a job.”

From there, I was flown to Atlanta for an interview at a professional placement firm that recommended me for a position in Omaha, Neb., for the presidency of a small, research hospital. It was there I encountered Father Val Peters, the CEO of Boys Town, and he introduced me to a genomics laboratory that he had established to uncover the genetic links that caused childhood deafness and blindness. That encounter 31 years ago has never left my mind.

Seven years later, as the new CEO of Windber Medical Center, our integrative practices captured the imagination of then-U.S. Rep. John Murtha. Murtha enjoyed observing our roving musicians, bread-baking machines in the hallways, and double beds in the obstetrical suites and loved the patient-centered care at Windber. It was during a dinner where we were seated beside each other at a physician’s home that Murtha challenged me to find someone from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center who would work with Windber on this new model of care.

A few months later, we submitted a grant request through Murtha’s office to the Department of Defense, and a year after that, a young lieutenant colonel, Dr. Craig Shriver, entered my office and said, “Windber has been approved for a grant to study breast cancer. What do you plan to do with the money?” As if from divine intervention or pure serendipity, I responded, “I’d like to create the genomics research institute for breast cancer for the Department of Defense here at Windber.”

Shriver’s immediate reply was, “As long as we’re going to study genomics, we might as well include proteomics, too.” To which I replied, “Yes we should.” Proteomics is the study of proteins. The reality was, with a background in teaching, to running Laurel Arts in Somerset, Laurel Highlands Tourism in Ligonier, and finally hospital administration, I did not even know what proteomics was, but we agreed that I’d be the local administrator, and he’d manage the scientific work. That was about 23 years ago. We created the Joyce Murtha Breast Care Center and Research Institute, and their CEO, Tom Kurtz, has very successfully continued that research relationship with the Defense Department.

They have amassed over 500,000 human tissue samples, and Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Molecular Medicine research has appeared in hundreds of publications worldwide. Shriver is still running that research program at the macro level with Dr. Hai Hu leading the effort locally, and they are still making an incredible difference in the world of both breast cancer and now, all types of cancer research internationally.

Murtha, Shriver, Kurtz, and now Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong have kept the dream alive.

The Italian poet Dante wrote, “From a little spark may burst a flame.”

Nick Jacobs is a Windber resident.

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