NY hospitals shelve rivalries for proton beam project

During the recent, over whether to let to local competing hospital systems build rival proton beam therapy centers, an obvious question was raised: Why not team up? "I get asked one question that I've not been able to answer, and that is why don't the hospitals work together and invest together and have these types of services that would serve a lot of the hospitals," said Amha Selassie, the director of Washington's health planning and development agency, during a hearings on proton therapy centers. "Especially the District of Columbia where the distances between the facilities are not that much and that the patient population is smaller than it is in many states and the physicians know each other and the administrators know each other."