Center for Discovery announces research, training affiliation with Northwell Health
ROCK HILL – New hiring, new construction and a new affiliation. The Center for Discovery is already marking several big developments in 2020.
Senior leaders at the Center, a world-renowned teacher, caregiver and researcher for individuals with complex developmental disabilities, announced on Wednesday a new research and training affiliation with Northwell Health, the state’s largest health-care provider.
The announcement comes as the Center’s leaders say they’re also making steady progress hiring 300 employees and building a hospital, research center and school in the former Frontier Insurance building at 165 Lake Louise Marie Road in Rock Hill.
Headquartered in New Hyde Park, nonprofit Northwell touts itself as New York's largest employer, with 72,000 employees across 23 hospitals, 800-plus outpatient facilities, and a $13.5 billion annual operating budget.
The new affiliation agreement calls for staff from Northwell and the Center to research and train together, their senior leaders said.
Their goal is “collaborating on research aimed at personalized medicine and personalized care,” to create effective treatment procedures for individuals with diagnoses like autism, cerebral palsy, and complex co-occurring conditions, said Terry Hamlin, the Center’s associate executive director.
The Center also will leverage Northwell’s economies of scale to save on purchases. But the agreement does not call for the Center or Northwell to refer cases to each other. No money or ownership stakes changed hands.
The Center “has a fabulous reputation for a very high level of sophistication of clinical care,” said Dr. Charles Schleien, Northwell’s senior vice president and chair of pediatric services. “They also have tremendous amounts of data and wonderful researchers, who can work along with our researchers.”
In other Center news, the nonprofit is on track to hire 100 employees by year’s end, plus another 200 by next year, raising the worker total for Sullivan County’s largest employer to 2,000.
The Center is currently waiting on state officials’ approval of architectural designs for a $25 million-plus overhaul of the former Frontier Insurance building, with the full project to be completed in early 2021.
Plans call for a first-floor sub-acute care specialty hospital, along with classrooms, and second-floor space for the Center’s newly created Research Institute for Brain and Body Health for the study of autism, dementia, ADHD and other brain disorders.
Plus, the 164,000-square-foot building’s third-floor will be used for additional research and administrative space. So far, the 27-year-old building has already been gutted.
The building’s 18-bed hospital portion is expected to annually serve 75 to 80 patients, between ages 5 and 21, with each typically staying between 45 days and six months.
Two-hundred employees will staff the new facility, which is being funded with a variety of public and private sources.
“It’s an amazing job they’re doing,” Sullivan County Legislator Luis Alvarez said of the Center’s expansion and collaboration with Northwell. The new hospital “is going to bring more and more professionals to this county, people who are going to live and spend money around here.”
daxelrod@th-record.com