Northwell Health is embarking on a $19 million construction project to conduct adult bone marrow transplants at its 48-acre facility in Glen Oaks, Queens.
The project, which includes refurbishing a roughly 9,000-square-foot space at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center’s main campus on the border of Queens and Long Island, will add a new 11-bed transplant unit to the 583-bed hospital, according to a recent filing with the state Health Department. The project will also include space in the hospital’s oncology building for supporting functions, including rooms for waiting and intake, medication, staff and equipment storage. Other work will take place on the mezzanine and roof to modify mechanical, electrical and plumbing infrastructure necessary to stand-up the new unit.
Administrators project the new unit will increase the adult bone marrow transplant market share of Northwell Health, the state’s largest health system and operator of Long Island Jewish Medical Center, by half in the coming years, according to documents filed with the state. In addition to the approximately 21% of the current Queens/Long Island market share from Northwell’s North Shore University Hospital and Cohen’s Children’s Medical Center, the system expects to perform close to a third of all adult bone marrow transplants in the region by 2028. If approved, the construction will take approximately one year, the filing states.
Northwell’s voracious expansion across multiple specialties and practice models has inflated patient revenues, which totaled $12 billion in the first nine months of 2024, according to the latest financial statement. The expansion puts the megasystem in closer competition with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, which currently dominates the bone marrow transplant market with 40.8% of adult transplants in the area, according to the filing documents.
The procedure is used in the treatment of blood cancers like leukemia and other life-threatening diseases and it can be expensive, ranging from $63,000 to $782,000 in the first 100 days, the hospital reported. In total, 422 adult bone marrow transplants were performed in 2023, it stated. More than half — 58% — of bone marrow recipients were on Medicaid or Medicare.
The new unit will add the procedure to a suite of oncology services the center initiated in 2022 with the opening of a 164-bed cancer hospital, funded largely by trustee and former Goldman Sachs executive Roy J. Zuckerberg.
