Sentara encounters pushback in its efforts to bring PET/CT to Woodbridge

WOODBRIDGE — The Virginia Department of Health will hold an informal fact-finding session after a petition to add a mobile PET/CT scanner was filed by Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center.

A PET/CT (Positron Emission Tomography-Computed Tomography) scanner is used to detect the early onset of cancer. A radioactive isotope, called a tracer, is injected into the body, and sugar inside the injection is absorbed by cancer cells, allowing the scanner to identify them.

The hospital is petitioning the state health department through the certificate of public need (COPN) process for permission to offer the service in at the Century Building, on the hospital campus on Opitz Boulevard in Woodbridge.

Sentara would provide the service in a mobile trailer parked on a newly constructed concrete pad site outside the building, with a scanner it already owns. A new sidewalk with awning would be built connecting the Century Building to the pad site.

PET/CT services would be provided on alternating days two and three days a week. Sentara plans to invest $315,000 in the capital costs for the project, according to its proposal.

Sentara is the only hospital in Northern Virginia without a PET/CT scanner. When not in Woodbridge, the mobile PET/CT scanner would be carted south and used at Sentara’s properties in Hampton Roads.

Heart disease and cancer, Sentara says, are the leading the leading causes of death in the hospital’s service area which includes eastern Prince William, northern Stafford, and southeastern Fairfax counties.

Sentara received a first-round approval for the service during Northern Virginia Health Systems Agency (HSANV) meeting Monday in Fairfax. A second public hearing is scheduled for March 12 at the HSANV offices at 3040 Williams Drive, Suite 200, in Fairfax. It will be the last chance for the public to provide in-person comment before the informal fact-finding session could be held in Richmond, which could happen in April.

With the absence of a PET/CT in Woodbridge, many doctors send their patients to one of the other five PET providers in Northern Virginia, to include centers in Gainesville, Falls Church, and Arlington. Two of the five PET/CT scanners in the region were listed as mobile scanners as recently as 2015.

Mark Goldstein is the managing director of the Metro Region PET Center, at 3289 Woodburn Road in Annandale, a stationary PET CT center. Many of Sentara’s patients are referred here.

Goldstein opposes Sentara’s application and says it’s important not to over-saturate the market with these types of services. Metro PET Center has been in operation since 1999, and Goldstein says his business could suffer if Sentara’s application is granted. 

“This would be eating into our business tremendously,” said Goldstein.

The Novant Health UVA Health System Cancer Center, at 7901 Lake Manassas Drive, in Gainesville, has operated its PET/CT scanner since August 2008. Unlike Sentara, the company was not required to go through the COPN process, stated Novant Health / UVA Medical Center spokeswoman Susan Tulio via email.

If Sentara’s application is approved, Tulio added there would be little impact on their operation.

The region has seen a 44 percent reduction in the number PET/CT scans between 2010 and 2016, according to Sentara’s application. Sentara says the decline in scans is because more patients are traveling to Washington, D.C., and Maryland for the procedures. Goldstein said that he’d seen no evidence to support that claim.

Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center estimates that, if approved, it would perform 230 to 254 PET CT scans in the first year of operation.

Before Sentara purchased what was then Potomac Hospital, the medical center offered the PET/CT service under an agreement with Inova Health of Fairfax. That service ended in 2010.