Georgetown University Hospital will close its doors at its Rockville satellite offices June 15, 2001. According to hospital spokeswoman Marianne Worley, general restructuring and operating losses throughout the hospital’s satellite offices forced the closure.

The satellite network, called the Georgetown Community Practice Network, posted an estimated loss between $3 million and $4 million earlier this year.

The Rockville offices include an office of the Lombardi Cancer Center at Shady Grove, Md., head and neck surgery offices, pediatrics offices and a radiation treatment center. Nearly 26,000 ontgomery County, Md. residents use the facility each year, according to Worley. The move will close all of the Rockville facilities that are nearly 18 miles from campus.

“I am reluctant to do it because of the disruptions it causes patients,” Hospital President Mary Joy Drass said in a release. According to Drass, the facility was too far from the hospital, and the volume was inadequate to keep it running.

The move will eliminate 54 support jobs including nursing positions, and will force 10 physicians to take up new practices away from Rockville. The rest of the staff at the facility will be relocated to various other facilities within the Georgetown system.

“We’ve been focusing on hospital campus operations,” Hospital Vice President for Public Affairs Karen Alcorn said. She added such moves are not unique to Georgetown, but are happening in other hospitals throughout the nation.

The move follows the sale of parts of the Georgetown University edical Center to the Columbia, Md.-based MedStar Health to help cut budgets to remedy considerable losses over the past three years.

Georgetown and MedStar Health had been in exclusive negotiations working toward a partnership under which MedStar operates the Med Center clinical enterprises. Since fiscal year 1997, the Med Center had reported increasing losses of $57 million, $63 million and $83 million. Officials attributed the losses to the growth of managed care.

The deal included Georgetown University Hospital and the Community Practice Network, to which the Rockville facility belonged and clinical practice activities of the Faculty Practice Group to be operated as part of the MedStar system.

MedStar Health absorbed nearly 250 physicians and 3,500 employees into its current rosters in taking over the hospitals and its branch facilities. They employ over 4,600 physicians and over 22,000 employees serving over a million patients each year.

MedStar currently operates six Baltimore-Washington area hospitals, including the Washington Hospital Center.

The hospital runs facilities and offices in various outlying localities including a large facility in Ballston, Va., and offices in Fredrick, Md. and Annapolis, Md.

Alcorn said the hospital had set up a dedicated hotline number to help patients locate doctors and deal with the closing. She also said the hospital would look to relocate the vast majority of the patients to on-campus facilities.