WINDBER - Thanks to a dream of a local cancer survivor, the [Windber Medical Center (2001)] will enter into a breast cancer risk assessment, treatment and research partnership with Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington D.C. 

U.S. Rep. John Murtha, announced on Thursday, that a portion of the $7 .5 million dollar grant from the Department of Defense will be used to establish a facility at Windber Medical Center with all research, diagnostic and treatment modalities needed to mirror screenings set up by Walter Reed.

Murtha said that the funds became a reality because of the strong views of local breast cancer survivors, including [Jeanne (Wolford) McKelvey (born 1947)], Windber Medical Center treasurer. 

"I am convinced that we will be able to find a cure and ultimately be. able to prevent breast cancer and that's why I've been in the forefront in directing over $S00 million of defense funding into breast cancer research and related programs in recent years," Murtha said. "It makes economic sense and defense sense to focus on breast cancer research and treatment for our servicewomen, especially when these programs can simultaneously benefit every women and the families of every women in America who faces breast cancer.'

[Jeanne (Wolford) McKelvey (born 1947)] spoke on the role she played in seeing the [Windber Medical Center (2001)] become part of such an important program.

McKelvey said that having gone through the treatment, she knew there had to be a better way. Since she and her husband are friends with the Congressman and his wife, McKelvey said concern was always expressed for her well being . "When we ran into them at a social event, the Congressman asked about my experience and what he could do for the women in this area who may be going through the same thing."

"You would be able to talk to others who have gone through the same thing because people who have been through the experience can help others. It would really be sort of a home away from home."

After listening to McKelvey, the Congressman asked where she would suggest such a center be located and she answered, the Windber Medical Center. Murtha issued McKelvey a challenge to put together a proposal for such a center, within ten days. McKelvey called [Francis Nicholas "Nick" Jacobs (born 1947)], CEO of Windber Medical Center, who had just returned from a trip to Bosnia, and the proposal was prepared within three days, she said. 

Jacobs commended McKelvey for her work on the project. He said, "through programs to prevent breast center, we will be able to prevent breast cancer."  Jacobs said that the new facility will be located near the $8 million dollar medical arts buildings  and will be called the Joyce Murtha Breast Care Center. "I think this is the first public facility in the area to be identified with Mrs. Murtha."

The Windber Medical Center's new breast care center will operate as an effective research screening facility to test Department of Defense beneficiaries of the genetic mutation that causes breast cancer in women. If the studies show women are prone to cancer through genetics, research will determine the proper protocols to be used army-wide to prevent the onslaught of breast cancer in both women in the military and Department of Defense dependents. 

WINDBER - A new method of determining if breast cancer will spread, sparing many women with early-stage breast cancer from chemotherapy, will be one of the research methods done at the new Joyce Murtha Breast Care Center to be built at [  Windber Medical Center (2001)].

A portion of a $7.5 million grant from the Department of Defense will be used to establish the center in honor of the congressman John Murtha's wife who has long been a proponent of early diagnosis and treatment. Eight representatives of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Dr. Joe Osterman from the Jackson Foundation, which administers the grant, were in Windber on Tuesday to meet with hospital officials.

"This is the first meeting between the people from Walter Recd and us," [Francis Nicholas "Nick" Jacobs (born 1947)], president and chief executive officer of Windber Medical Center, said. "We're discussing who is doing what, how, when and where. We already collaborate with Walter Reed on the Ornish program and this will be a similar joint venture."

(A defense department grant was awarded earlier for defense department employees, retirees and their families to use the Dr. Dean Ornish Heart Disease Reversal Program at the hospital.)

[Col. Craig David Shriver, MD (born 1958)], chief of surgical oncology at Walter Recd, said the hospital has a good relationship with Windber Medical Center.

"We at Walter Reed are proud of our association with Windber and grateful that congressman (John) Murtha supports these programs." he said. "We will be screening people and assessing their risk of developing breast cancer. Those who are unfortunate to get it will have the advantage of being at a center on the most cutting edge of treatment."

"Some call it an epidemic of breast cancer," Shriver said. ''By age 90, one in nine women will develop it and we are seeing an increase in younger women. Our first goal is to help women learn their risks so they will be diagnosed at an early age because the cure rate is 90 percent if detected early. Our second goal is to show how you can affect the life-changes to prevent breast cancer."

About 175,000 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. Most will have small tumors that have not spread to the lymph nodes. About 70 percent can be cured with surgery and radiation alone. Cancer will reoccur in about 30 percent, who will need chemotherapy.

A German researcher released a study on Monday al the 91st Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research held in San Francisco, Dr. Anita Prechtl, Technical University in Munich, described the use of two proteins in tumors that might help reveal the likelihood of the cancer coming back.

The proteins arc uPA - short for urokinase-type plasminogen activator - and its natural inhibitor, known us PAI--l. About 45 percent of breast cancer patients have high levels of these proteins. they have a higher risk of cancer spread. The new method is called microarray testing. A computer will analyze the sequence of proteins and compare how they. change over time.

It is a very exciting field of study, Shriver said. Instead of removing all the lymph nodes under a woman's arm, they are able to remove one or two for study. It is a more accurate means of determining if the cancer will spread and allows the majority of women avoid side effect of chemotherapy.

"The power of microarray testing is that it allows us .to analyze a huge number of genetic markers over a period of time." he said, "Computers assist with the data analysis. It's a powerful tool to help us decide which women are at risk by testing the tissue. Now we treat them as studies of a large number of people have shown is effective. We will he able to individualize treatment to each patient."

Groundbreaking for the new center should be in the next two months, Jacob said. Construction will he completed within a year.

"If is a significant day for us because we are signaling the beginning of the partnership with Walter Reed for the breast care center," Jacobs said. "This gives life to the dream of having a national breast care center in this area."

Lt. Col. Alfred Brooks, M.D., chief of medical oncology at Walter Reed,  said the new center will be an opportunity to enhance the concept of breast care in general, not just breast cancer. Prevention is the key. The center can make a significant impact in the ur ·as of research, prevention and treatment, he said.

Nick Jacobs isn’t just a popular blogger. He’s also president and CEO of Windber Research Institute and Windber Medical Center of Windber, PA. A couple of readers suggested I talk to Nick about small-hospital technology. If you think that’s an oxymoron, read on about what this tiny rural hospital of a few dozen beds is doing.

Tell me about Windber and about yourself.

• The hospital is 101 years old, started specially as a hospital to take care of the coal miners for the 40+ coal mines of the Berwind-White Coal Company. When the town of Windber was constructed, it was seen as what would be a model town for the industrial revolution. Every house had a central heating system provided by the coal company, schools, hospitals, and churches. It was like the Celebration community in Orlando. The commitment was made that this hospital would be one of the most outstanding in the US.

• For the first 40 years, the starting physicians were innovators, to the point they held numerous patents and successes. They studied with the Mayo brothers, like learning to remove the thyroid without leaving scar. Celebrities came for the surgery, like Betty Grable, Arthur Godfrey, and Jeanne Woolworth.

• We’re 30 seconds from where Flight 93 went down. I came in 1997. We have 550 employees now and a $21 million payroll.

• The issue for me when I came was that the hospital had been given a death certificate by Ernst and Young. In the coming era of capitated managed care, the hospital had a short life left. That gave me a chance to challenge my board. I told them, “We can let it go, or we can try to go back to innovation and technical advancement and high-touch care.”

• We had the first hospice in the US, founded in 1977, for a rural area. I was able to use that as a model for physicians and the board, telling them, “Look how people are treated in the hospice. I want to take this hospital-wide.” We’re a Planetree hospital now, the third in the US of what is now 200. We embraced the concept of spiritual, holistic, mind-body-spirit care, the highest touch concept.

• Having interviewed at Boys Town Hospital in Omaha in 1992, I got to a hospital that looked like Windber but was called National Research Hospital. I asked a priest why. He had 38 PhDs and was a genomics center in 1992. I found myself at a dinner party with our local Congressman talking about the Dean Ornish CAD Reversal Program. I explained it to him. He said, “We’re spending $1 billion a year on heart disease in the military.” We launched partnership with Walter Reed the following year. 

• Then, a board member got breast cancer and came to our hospital. That made me uncomfortable. I wondered why she didn’t go to Sloane-Kettering or MD Anderson. She went through it at our place, then went there for a second opinion. She went to our Congressman and said, “These guys have figured it out.” We have massage therapy, popcorn, clowns, family access, everything. She told the Congressman that the military was spending all that money, but nothing in our district.

• We built a research facility with 50 scientists and 40,000 of the most highly annotated breast cancer tissue samples. These are longitudinal studies because they’re in the military. We built a team of biomedical informaticists who have perfected software and methodologies for mining huge quantities of medical-related data.

• Because I’d never worked in a research institute, and in fact didn’t get into healthcare until I was 40 because I was a high school band director, one thing I discovered is that I didn’t care about the past and wasn’t tied to it. When I had a chance to create a research center from scratch, I decided I would meet with my first three PhD hires and ask them what the bottlenecks had been. First, all science is called small science. You get an idea for secret sauce, go to NIH for money, build your team, then I might take it away from you. I decided that instead of creating divas, I’d create a ensemble of people who could work with each other.

• Also, I decided that all information would be stored together instead of on individual PCs. So, we had terabytes of data to study, but had to build from scratch data mining. I hired a Penn bioinformatics director, hired 10 people, and worked with dozens of companies to come up with trademarked capabilities. Researchers in our institute can query all 40,000 ladies in our database. How many of you drank coffee? How much coffee? Then, you can do an analysis of which ones got breast cancer. This was set up in a manner so that not all donated serum and blood and tumors were cancerous. Interesting. Maybe those who drank the most coffee don’t have breast cancer. It creates a way to query issues that could be pertinent to disease states. It was not disease-specific. It can apply to any disease.

• I found that PhDs don’t talk to MDs. I hired some MDs and got teleconferencing to meet weekly with oncologists and pathologists from the Army about problems with individual patients. We took those back to the bench to find solutions. That’s translational medicine. We’re way out ahead of everybody’s headlights, and for those mired in the traditional system, they’re not only afraid but desperate victims because it changes the way they get funding.

• To communicate information back and forth to the Army, we have a network of OC-48 capable dark fiber. We can transfer entire hard drives in seconds. In Windber, PA, a town of 4,200 people, we have some interesting opportunities. The space and missile defense command that had the original Star Wars defense program had a civilian who put together a team of $7 billion worth of research to fuse infrared and radar together to detect missiles from outer space. His sister died of breast cancer. He vowed to have those algorithms declassified for us to fuse ultrasound and digital mammography. GE is a partner doing research with us. We have three MRIs with breast-scanning capabilities doing fusion of technologies to find better ways to avoid misdiagnosis. All in a little 50-bed hospital two hours from Pittsburgh. It’s a fascinating evolution that came from the mind of a band director. [laughs]

Describe the hospital’s IT systems and their role in your strategic plan.

• Because of the system that we’ve put together, we have interest from all over the world, except in the US. Go to the Netherlands, there are eight academic medical centers cooperating, but they didn’t have tools to mine the data to make it translational. We’ve been back and forth for a year working on software we created here to mine that data.

• We get breast cancer tissue donations. We can do a genetic analysis in-house to determine which genes contributed to it. Then, we have the capability of determining which proteins were contributors to spreading the disease. Both of those modalities create huge quantities of data. Then, we do histopathology and molecular research, clinical and diagnostic data. We have mountains of data. One piece of equipment can create six months of data to research. We can see the potential impact of alcohol or obesity. We think it will contribute substantially to future cures as we analyze the data.

• On the downside, we’re way out ahead of the headlights. We’ve spent millions trying to get software companies to cooperate with each other and designers. In one meeting, we had six companies involved in the data collection process. We had to put them in a room and lock them in until they agreed. Everybody was afraid to let their secret out. One large company that I’ll leave nameless – they can mine huge quantity of data for retail and banks, but in biology, they walked away and said, “We can’t and won’t do it becuase something that’s brown 1000 times turns green. It just happens.” They had no way to turn their analytical tools into biological analytical tools to meet our needs.. Another company asked for a meeting and in the NDA said, “Anything you say that we can remember, we can use.” [laughs]

How important is IT overall to a hospital’s success and to patient outcomes?

• We just put out another $3 million for Meditech.

• Concentia Digital of Columbia, Maryland … Duane Shugars is president, a young guy. His company was hired by National Geographic to digitally catalog all their images and films. If you want a picture of a lion with a bird on its nose, you can search for it on the Web and buy it on the Web. Then the NFL contracted with them to catalog and organize plays, so when they said, “Here are Terry Bradshaw’s top plays”, they can find them. Then the CIA and FBI hired them. They came to us through an acquaintance. Everything we do is digitized and put into their repository. With 40,000 samples, a single pathologist has done an analysis. He’s a research pathologist instead of a clinical pathologist, so instead of 20 things, he looks at 120. Theoretically, any scientist anywhere in the world looking for samples can be search and those samples would come to them visually.

They say politicians can have national influence, but they still have to be re-elected by the folks back home. Windber has a lot of national publicity, but you’ve said locals don’t really know much about the hospital. How can you bring the national message back home where it can do some good?

• In 1977, we had the second Johnstown Flood. We had the largest out-migration of any urban area in the US except East St. Louis, Missouri. Our demographics look like Dade County, Florida. We have large quantities of octogenarians. The average person has lived in their home for 38 years. The hospital went through a tough decade in 60s and 70s. If they have a bad experience, they don’t easily forget it.

• Our publicity has been in Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Today Show. That’s not where they live. It’s been a 10-year uphill battle to get our locals to realize that this is a unique place. The national infection rate is 9% in a hospital. Ours has been below 1% for almost nine years. So, how do you put billboards up and say, “Come to Windber and you’ll die less”? [laughs] It’s a challenge that doesn’t make for happy competitors.

• We’re starting to get local recognition, but it’s happened because of my blogs. The former public relations director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, now 81 years old, said, “Why aren’t you blogging?” I wrote my first blog in May 2005, having no idea that I was the only hospital CEO with a hospital-endorsed blog in the country. The local paper asked me to write op-eds about healthcare. Another little paper asked me to write a comedy column and I became a local folk personality, the baby boomer with the child problems. Then, there were other blogs. The bad news is that none of them pay, but we’re getting the word out. When I was in the Netherlands, they said, “We love your blog.” [laughs]

Tell me about the Planetree system.

• Angela Thieriot had to have surgery in the 1970s. She went into a San Francisco hospital and had the typical hospital experience, like being a lab rat. You’re a number and an organ and it’s cold and detached and there are heavy duty rules based on the military system of triage. She came out of it wrecked that American healthcare was so insensitive and cold.

• She convinced the hospital to give her a wing to design care that doesn’t require leaving your dignity by the door. A hospital in Oregon tried it and was interviewed on Bill Moyer’s “Healing and the Mind.’ She became a folk hero in a little 50-bed hospital. The movement started to get traction. It did well for eight or so years, then died. A hospital in Connecticut bought the franchise rights and I was the third hospital in the US to become a Planetree hospital.

• I’ve been on their board for four years. We’re pushing 160 hospitals worldwide. It’s catching on as Baby Boomers become patients. They’re not happy with instant Sanka in a pack. They will want a decaf latte with skim milk. It’s the best of a hotel, hospital, and spa. Patient empowerment and patient care. Care isn’t centered on physician times and dates or employee’s availability. It’s based on centering care around the patient. Every patient in our hospital is touched multiple times every day by caregivers other than RNs and MDs. We provide beds for loved ones, kitchens, showers, and beds in the OB suite.

• The greatest compliment was when surveyors from state were here two years ago and couldn’t fund anything wrong. The surveyor said she wasn’t from around here and it was the 35th hospital she’d been in this year, but told her husband that if anything happened to her anywhere, no matter what, bring her here.

• I’m 60 years old and have six heart stents and my mission is to change the way healthcare is delivered. I’m saddened by how science works and how hospitals don’t cross the line of taking care of souls and not bodies

Can the hospital succeed as an independent and can anybody compete with UPMC in western Pennsylvania?

• I don’t know. If we had not made the choice made by our board, there would not be a community hospital here. Was either decision a good one for the community? The board chose to take this on and try to compete. We only represent 6% of the healthcare in this region. It’s not like we can put them out of business. On any given day, if you say “Go Penn State” or “Go Pitt”, you’ll make half the people in the room mad. It’s not just an UPMC juggernaut, it’s also a Geisinger juggernaut.

• Three, four or five years from now, will Conemaugh survive? UPMC has already made a run on this area and it didn’t go the way they hoped, but they have their joint ventures and insurance here. It remains to be seen if Geisinger comes in. We can survive only if we put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Oprah drops off her dog at a spa 20 minutes from here. If I can get her in here and beat that 30% error rate … I think the answer is yes, we can survive, but that’s an uphill challenge.

You mentioned in discussing Michael Moore’s Sicko that we’ve never had a health policy in this country. Why do we need one and what will it take?

• I’m not a policy wonk and I was out front in rejecting Hillary’s last plan. It doesn’t do any of us well to have what England or Canada has. The waiting time is years. People come across the border from Canada for heart surgery. I’m not sure that plan is the best way to go.

• Internationally, we’re through the roof, #1 in cost and #42 in quality of health. I’ve seen a lot of diagnostics that relate to typical overhead. With a private insurance company, it’s 20%. With Medicare, 3%. There’s got to be something in between that makes this work. UPMC is positioning themselves to be a global player in single payer. Highmark is doing that. Does that look like Medicare or a modified insurance system?

• I can be the least expensive hospital in the US and it doesn’t matter because the insurance company doesn’t have to pass it on to the consumer. We have to find a solution that doesn’t permit this outrageous 47 million people to be uninsured. That’s unconscionable. Some kind of single payer has to evolve or it will become a worse and worse train wreck.

You’re speaking at a blogging conference this month. What’s your message going to be?

• So many of my peers are finance guys who stick their heads in the sand and go with business as usual. It’s kept us locked in the industrial revolution. I’m doing a podcast next Friday with someone from Mayo. Transparency will be huge. Communication through the Internet is huge. We’re more connected than we’ve ever been in history. A political leader who could lie to his people is being checked internationally by hundreds of young people. We’re finally totally linked.

• I wrote a blog that I thought the demise of Imus was because of that. It wasn’t that he hadn’t said something like that 1000 times before, but everybody grabbed onto it and made something out of it. Get with it and figure it out. It’s the new world order. New tools will reach out to people in a different way that will make or break your business.

If you weren’t CEO at Windber, what job would you want?

• If I’d been talented eough, a top level orchestra director. It’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. Touching people’s lives like this is important, though. At this stage of my life, I’d just like to speak and write to change healthcare. I love getting the message out and shaking up the status quo. It’s not my system, it’s an old system that needs re-evaluated. Some day I’m going to write a book at how being a high school band director is like being a hospital administrator. It really is.

The 10 minute drive to work was routine. It was one of those amazing September mornings where, no matter your age, your work responsibilities, or your lifestyle, you had to be in awe over the beauty and brilliance of the nearly cloudless, luminescent blue sky. It was warm, sunny, and what could only be described as a perfect morning. In fact, every time I experience those same stunning atmospheric conditions of that Western Pennsylvania morning, a tinge of telltale PTSD chemistry runs through both my connecting neurons and my bloodstream because what unfolded not two hours later  evolved into an emotional catastrophe for our country. 

The very nature of my position as the CEO of a hospital often revolves around one’s ability to cope with tragedy, heartbreak, and trauma. In fact, having spent the previous five years at the Level 1 Trauma center, communicating and dealing with tragedy had somehow become, at a certain level, just part of the job. That morning, however, was different. It was a virtual body blow to the soul on every level.

My 8 a.m. meeting with a former Mossad agent and a U.S. Ranger was a discussion of the possibility of utilizing our sophisticated proteomics and genomic analytical equipment from the DoD funded research institute that was a part of our health system in detecting the presence of anthrax. It was a topic that I had hoped would never need to be broached in little Windber, Pennsylvania, but world matters, terrorism, and various political miss-steps had gotten us to this point in our international relationships.

In the middle of this meeting, my assistant politely interrupted our meeting to suggest I step into the administrative conference room to watch the television that had been tuned into the Today Show. As I stood to walk there, my cellphone rang. 

It was my wife who said, “Are you watching this?” 

My response was, “What?”

To which she replied, “A plane just hit the twin towers.”

“I’m on my way to the TV right now,” I replied.

And as I entered the small conference room, plane No. 2 hit the second building. No one was really sure what was happening at that time, but that second plane did not seem like the first hit was a fluke. We watched for a few minutes more and then returned to the meeting where we continued our previous anthrax discussion. 

Several minutes later, I received a call from the Trauma Center that they had just been notified that a plane with 157 passengers on board had reported a bomb on board and were headed toward the Johnstown airport. The caller suggested that I put our hospital on full trauma alert. My mind immediately sorted through those numbers and realized that at least 100 of those potential patients could not be cared for immediately in the three local hospitals due to staffing and capacity issues. I called an immediate full-alert which meant getting extra gurneys, calling in off-duty emergency room physicians, and preparing for a full disaster response. 

A few minutes later when people described my complexion as a dull shade of gray, I received another call, and that call was more stark. Cancel the trauma alert, the plane has crashed near Shanksville, your paramedics will be needed onsite. By then, the word of the attack on the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and what some referred to as Fort Murtha because there were so many DoD funded plants operating in this area had painted a picture of warfare, and we were told there were approximately 1200 unaccounted for airplanes in the sky of the United States and we should be on the lookout for stolen ambulances and other emergency vehicles potentially containing terrorists. 

Our paramedics were deployed and spent the day at the site of the crash. When they returned, they told me the following, “We have bad news and worse news. Everyone on that plane was killed, and no one there took precautions in the event there was anthrax or any other potentially lethal substance on board that flight. We could all be dead by the end of this week.” 

Ironically, by the end of the week, the hospital was filled with sneezing, coughing employees who had either psychologically manifested an anthrax infection or had not taken proper precautions against a common cold. And that was the beginning. 

Nick Jacobs a senior partner with Senior Management Resources was the CEO of Windber Medical Center and Windber Research Institute on Sept. 11.

Sep. 25—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — A few weeks ago, on a pleasant summer day in Brcko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brian Subich and Nebojsa Pisaric reunited for the first time in more than two decades.

They ate and laughed and drank beer and slivovitz plum brandy, and shared memories about the days they spent together in Johnstown in 1999.

Back then, Pisaric was an undersized 10-year-old boy with what appeared to be life-threatening kidney disease — and no way to properly treat it in his war-ravaged hometown, which lacked clean water. Subich was a member of Johnstown City Council.

Pisaric, along with his mother Dragica Pisaric, came to Johnstown as part of a sister-city program supported by U.S. Rep. John Murtha, of Johnstown. They stayed with Subich's parents, Nicholas and Rose Ann Subich, in the city's West End.

Doctors at what was then Windber Medical Center determined the young child only had an infection that could easily be cared for with modern medicine in the United States.

'Thrilled to be there'

After regaining his health, Pisaric returned home. The families lost touch.

But, a few years ago, Subich found Pisaric on Facebook. They rekindled their relationship, and when Subich and his wife, Theresa Subich, took a recent vacation to Croatia, they made a day trip to meet up with the Pisarics.

"When we saw Brian, it was something special and emotional," Nebojsa Pisaric said in an interview, using an online translator.

Subich called the meeting "very simple."

"We just went to their house and talked," Subich said. "It was emotional to see people that, yes, you only have met one time, but yet you sort of knew that there was this connection. You knew how they felt about us, how we felt happy to assist and help them. We just went to their house.

"Dragica Pisaric, she clearly had been cooking for quite a while and had more food and more drinks than even I could handle. They were just so happy to have us there, and we were thrilled to be there."

They also did FaceTime conversations with Rose Ann Subich and Brian Subich's son, Nick Subich, who as a young child played with Pisaric during the 1999 visit.

'Scars are healed'

Brian Subich had previously been to Brcko in the aftermath of the Bosnian War, when bombed-out buildings, land mines and distrust among the nation's Serbian, Croatian and Muslim populations remained. He was part of a delegation from the U.S. that also included then-Windber Medical Center President Nick Jacobs and then-Johnstown Mayor Don Zucco.

Brcko, a city of about 40,000 people, is in much better shape today.

"It's improved infinitely," Subich said. "I remember the city hall. We spent a lot of time there when I was in Brcko, so I knew I would remember what the city hall looked like. And, sure enough, we drove past it, and I was like, 'Well, that's the city hall,' and our driver knew, 'Yeah, that is the city hall. You're right.'

"The city hall at that time had already been repaired when we were there, but not much else had. Well, now, everything else is repaired, and those scars are healed over for the most part. It looks just like any other European city."

Subich added: "I was a young guy when I went over there. I was in my early 20s. I had never been to a war zone and had never seen in person what war looks like, and it certainly is not pretty. That certainly sticks in my mind to this day — what the surroundings looked like and the conditions that they were living in."

Pisaric still resides in the town that has rebuilt itself, working in construction.

Numerous people helped the Pisarics when they visited Johnstown.

Former City Councilwoman Martha Banda took them shopping for clothes. Nicholas Subich and his sister, Genevieve "Aunt Jenny" Bagan, spoke Croatian and helped translate.

Frank Pasquerilla, who was then the chairman and chief executive of Crown American Realty Trust, provided a sizable financial contribution that made the trip and Nebojsa Pisaric's care possible.

"I knew that my father did help this kid," said Johnstown businessman Mark Pasquerilla, Frank Pasquerilla's son. "But, you see, we had separate offices with this rotunda in the middle (in Crown headquarters). This is classic my father, because he would never tell me a lot of these things. ... I never knew that. But it would be typical. He did a lot of things like this that I only heard about years later after his death — some of these good things that he never really made a big deal about or bragged to the family or anything."

Subich said: "It was neat to be able to assist people from a place I had been and a place that sort of played a large impact on me."

And for the Pisarics, the experience was life-changing, and, in Nebojsa Pisaric's case, possibly even life-saving.

"Johnstown, I remember great, from coming to the airport and coming to the house of the Subich family," Nebojsa Pisaric said. "Our arrival at your place changed our lives, and we will never forget what you did for us."

Little did I know when I was a young band director and trumpet player that my life would lead me into breast cancer research. If the phrase circuitous route rings a bell, you can bet that was my journey. In fact, if you try to follow this one, you may need to drop breadcrumbs along the way and hope the birds don’t eat them just so you can find your way home. 

​After teaching for ten years, I began working at a series of challenging jobs for which I had no formal training. First, I ran an umbrella arts organization for Somerset County, Laurel Arts. Then I was hired as the head of Laurel Highlands Tourism. It was during that job, however, that I recognized my lack of formal business understanding, went back to school for a Master's degree in Public Management, and after being recruited to start a Foundation for Mercy Hospital in Johnstown, focused that degree work on Hospital Administration.  

​Ten years into my healthcare experience, I became the president of a small local hospital in Windber, and my real journey began. You see, I had interviewed for a CEO position in Omaha, Nebraska, seven years earlier and was introduced to a man that could only be described as a futurist. Father Val Peters, the then president of Boys’ Town, under which was Boys’ Town National Research Hospital, a genomic research laboratory located in the basement of the hospital. There were about 35 scientists working on understanding what caused genetic deafness and blindness. 

​Two years into my tenure at Windber, I decided to apply for federal funding through then Congressman John Murtha for heart disease research. Because he was the chairman of the subcommittee on funding for the Department of Defense, my proposal included a potential partnership with Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. 

​After a year of running a successful joint program in heart disease research, a board member of ours, Jeanne McKelvey, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She, in fact, went to the congressman and challenged him to fund research in breast cancer. Incredibly, the women in the military were not even getting mammograms at that time. Congressman Murtha told me to write a proposal to fund breast cancer research at Windber, and when a young doctor (and former trumpet player) from Walter Reed, Craig Shriver, came to visit me, he asked, “What do you want to do.”

​This is where serendipity or divine intervention came into play as I looked him straight in the eye and said, “I want to be the genomic research center for breast cancer for the Department of Defense.” His reply was, “Well, if we’re going to do genomic research, we might as well do proteomic research, too.” And my answer was, “Yes, we should. Because I’m not sure what either of those are, I’ll be the administrator and you can be the physician scientist.”  

​Twenty-three years later, we are still working on breast cancer research, but I believe our training as musicians became the cornerstone for several of the discoveries made at Windber. You see, we took a non-traditional approach to setting up the lab that included ensembles of scientists with various backgrounds and skills. We also made the information discovered by the scientists available to everyone working there. 

​Twenty-three years later, the more than 150,000 breast cancer samples collected with hundreds of fields of demographic information have been used to successfully map the human breast cancer genome. And hopefully, the discoveries made in Windber will contribute to amazing cures for this dreaded disease.

​It’s not just about what you have learned. It’s about how you apply what you’ve learned in new, creative ways to various challenges. Breast cancer will soon become a manageable disease, and I know the work of Dr. Craig Shriver will have helped make that happen. 

Nick Jacobs of Windber is a Senior Partner with Senior Management Resources and author of the blog healinghospitals.com

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – Former U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis spoke bluntly in 2013 about the importance of his diplomatic counterparts at the Department of State whose work is to prevent conflicts around the world.

“If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition,” Mattis, then the commander of U.S. Central Command, famously said at a congressional hearing.

For the past two years, Johnstown-area native [Richard Rahul Verma (born 1968)] has served as one of the State Department’s top diplomats and its chief operating officer, representing the U.S. around the world – listening, trying to reduce tensions and bring stability, he said, while keeping the safety of the hometown that shaped him at the top of his mind.

“When I was back in Johnstown last summer, I tried to explain to folks that I believe that foreign policy is really about serving local interests,” he said. “It’s about making sure your lives are actually better and safer and stronger; that your kids are able to study abroad and that there are investment opportunities; and that you know if you run into a crisis somewhere around the world, we are there to be there for you.”

Verma has served as deputy secretary of state for management and resources in a challenging time, taking the job a month after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine to start the biggest armed conflict in Europe since World War II.

Previously, Verma was the U.S. ambassador to India under President Barack Obama.

In a Zoom interview with The Tribune-Democrat from Washington, D.C., Verma reflected on his time in the State Department as he prepares to transfer his duties to a new team that will be ushered in with President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration Monday.

Verma has been to 60 countries and 76 embassies and consulates, and has conducted 14 domestic trips since he was nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate in 2023 to fill a vacancy in one of the department’s main leadership roles.

His first trip as deputy secretary was to Ukraine, and five months ago, with the end of Penny Pritzger’s one-year term as special representative to that country, he picked up the department’s responsibilities for fostering Ukraine’s economic recovery – which is underway even as the war with Russia continues.

[Image :  Richard Verma, Volodymyr Zelenskyy]

Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Richard Verma (second from right) greets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy before a tour of the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in September 2024 in Scranton.

“I’ve been overseeing the economic recovery piece of it,” he said. “I think we have bipartisan support for that, and I think we have a lot of support in the private sector.

“I can’t speak for what the new administration might do ... but hopefully they understand the huge stakes and the risk to the democratic order and to global security if Russia’s actions are allowed to continue, so this has incredibly high stakes to it.”

The number of problems in the world and the complexity of those problems are changing, he said, and the Department of State has had to adapt.

“And so even more demands are being put on the institution,” he said. “We’ve had to be really creative about how we are responding to threats – from pandemics to climate change, from food insecurity and energy insecurity in addition to all those other problems we’ve walked through, whether it was Russia-Ukraine, the war in the Middle East or competition with China.”

As deputy secretary of state for management and resources, one of two deputy secretary positions in the department, Verma has served as the department’s chief operating officer and principal adviser to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on resource allocation and management of the department.

He also assisted in carrying out Blinken’s authority and responsibility for the overall direction of operational programs of the department, including foreign assistance programs.

‘Privilege and an honor’

One of Verma’s duties in his office has been to oversee the Department of State’s $60 billion budget – which reflects 1% of the entire federal budget.

“I think it’s an institution that has been under-budgeted, overworked and understaffed for a long time,” Verma said, mentioning Mattis’ past remarks.

Working for the betterment of the 80,000-member department, with staff spread across the nation and around the world, has been especially rewarding, he said.

“It’s been incredibly heartening to see this workforce,” Verma said.

About 20% of the department’s workforce is composed of military veterans. More veterans work in the State Department than any other federal agency outside the Department of Defense, he said.

Verma is an Air Force veteran and the recipient of numerous military awards and civilian decorations including the Meritorious Service Medal, the State Department’s Distinguished Service Award and the Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship.

“It’s just such a privilege and an honor to be able to do this work,” he said. “We are in a super-challenging global environment, but having said that, America is still counted on to be the leader in so many areas, on human rights, on security, on democracy, on basic democratic values in this era, and so our voice really matters.”

The department employs people from all 50 states, and Verma proudly hails from Johnstown, where he grew up attending the Westmont Hilltop public schools.

“When I think about how I ended up here, I do really believe that growing up in Johnstown with my friends, with my neighbors, with my coaches, with my teachers, was a very formative experience, and it was a great experience,” he said. “I really do owe so much to the people of Johnstown and western Pennsylvania, and I never forget that.”

‘A reminder for me’

Verma’s parents settled in Johnstown in 1971 after immigrating to the U.S. from India.

His father, Kamal Verma, was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, and his mother, Savitri Verma, was a special needs teacher, counselor and social worker.

“I think I lived through a period in Johnstown when it was still doing quite well in the early ’70s,” he said, “and then we had this combination of the flood in 1977, and then came this transition to globalization, where we lost a lot of jobs, and I saw a lot of people in the United States kind of forget about all the sacrifices and hard work that had been put into the country by the people of the region.

“It’s a reminder for me when I do my work – making sure that I don’t forget about the backbone of the country, whether that’s in western Pennsylvania or another part of America. Our work has got to advance people’s interests, and give people confidence in us to try to go out and do some good in the world.”

Growing up in Johnstown was “an incredible lesson in hard work and standing up for each other – really looking out for one another,” he said.

Verma, 56, has lived in the Washington, D.C., area for more than 20 years, but he’s never lost sight of where he’s from, said Jeff Stumpo, one of Verma’s close friends in Johnstown since they attended kindergarten together.

“We always keep in contact with each other,” Stumpo said. “I’ve received phone calls from him from Turkey, from India – you never know where he’s going to be or where he’s going to call you back from.”

Verma established an endowment fund administered by the Community Foundation for the Alleghenies in 2023 to support Westmont Hilltop students who may need extra financial support to cover fees or other costs associated with after-school sports or activities.

“Although he’s not living here, he’s still giving back,” Stumpo said. “That shows the kind of human he is.”

‘Helped us navigate’

[Francis Nicholas "Nick" Jacobs (born 1947)], of Windber, said [Richard Rahul Verma (born 1968)] made a lasting impact on saving Windber Hospital – now Chan Soon-Shiong Medical Center at Windber [See Windber Medical / Chan Soon-Shiong partnership ] – early in his law career.

Verma graduated from Westmont Hilltop High School in 1986 and went on to study law. He earned multiple academic degrees, including a law degree from American University and a master’s degree in international law from Georgetown University Law Center.

[Francis Nicholas "Nick" Jacobs (born 1947)] said he and [Richard Rahul Verma (born 1968)] reconnected decades ago, when Verma was working as a young attorney at a top firm, Steptoe & Johnson, in Washington, D.C., and when Jacobs transitioned from education to become president of the board at Windber.

“The hospital had just begun receiving grants through Congressman John Murtha to establish the Windber Research Institute, and we needed legal advice as to how to structure the organization and manage those funds,” Jacobs said. “There’s no book on how to deal with federal grants. Rich helped us.

“During my 11 years with the hospital, it brought $250 million in research money. There were so many speed bumps and Rich helped us navigate them. If it hadn’t been for Rich, it could have gone the wrong way.”

When federal support for the hospital got snarled in politics as Murtha aired his opposition to the Iraq war in the 2000s, Verma was again influential.

[Richard Rahul Verma (born 1968)] had been elevated to senior national security adviser for the Senate’s then-majority leader, Harry Reid. Biden was also in the Senate at the time and Blinken was a Senate staffer with [Richard Rahul Verma (born 1968)], foreshadowing their teamwork later in the Department of State.

With the Windber hospital’s federal support in jeopardy, Verma advised its board on how to work with the senator to get support for a scientific partnership with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in Reid’s home state.

“All of Murtha’s grants to us were put on hold, but the Harry Reid grant came through, so, Rich, unbeknownst to him, saved the research institute from laying people off,” Jacobs said. “(The Windber hospital) is still a nonprofit and a Department of Defense research institute. It’s a central part of cancer research in the United States. I give a lot of credit for that to Rich.”

Jacobs said he and his wife, who had also taught in Westmont Hilltop School District while Verma was a student, were “always extremely proud to know Rich and to consider him a product of this area.”

When [Richard Rahul Verma (born 1968)] became the United States’ 25th ambassador to India in 2014, several of his friends from Johnstown, including Stumpo and [Francis Nicholas "Nick" Jacobs (born 1947)], attended his swearing-in ceremony.

As the ambassador to India, Verma led one of the largest U.S. diplomatic missions and championed historic progress in bilateral cooperation on defense, trade and clean energy.

“He’s an amazing man with incredible skills, and he would make a wonderful president of the United States sometime,” Jacobs said. “And when that happens, we would love to be at his swearing-in ceremony, too.”

‘The next chapter’

Verma leaves his job as the deputy secretary of state for management and resources with a long list of accomplishments.

He’s led initiatives including renewing U.S. leadership at major multilateral climate engagements such as the G20 Task Force on Climate and Finance; relocating 191,000 Afghan allies since August 2021; building private-sector engagement for Ukraine’s economic recovery; improving security cooperation in Mexico through programming that enhanced investigations and prosecutions of drug traffickers and criminal networks; and securing a budget for the department to continue its work in fiscal year 2025.

“Hopefully, we left the place stronger, better than how we found it, and that we made a difference for people around the world and made a difference for people across our country,” Verma said. “And I’ll let others decide how we did, but that’s what we were working on, and that’s what I hopefully have had an impact on – changing some difficult situations for the better and that it’s had a positive impact on people’s lives and livelihoods.”

Verma said that with his role in leading U.S. foreign policy coming to an end, he looks forward to spending more time with his wife and three teenage children at their home in Maryland.

“I don’t know what I’ll do next, and I’m going to take some time to sort it out,” he said. “I’ll try to continue to stay engaged. I’m a big believer in service and impact, and maybe I’ll try to figure out a way to give back through teaching a little bit and some pro bono legal work, but I’m going to take a little bit of time to figure out the next chapter.”

Verma has been working to help with the transition to the department’s incoming administration.

“This institution has been around since the founding of the republic, and you never get to a point where you have solved everything,” he said. “But you try to get to a point where you are just building more resilience, more stability, more security, more prosperity, and you realize this is a life’s work. And you hand the ball off to a new team coming in and they are going to handle it for a while, and so this is something that will just continue. You try to neutralize the threats, and you try to do the right thing.”

Reflecting on all of his travels around the world, Verma said one of his most memorable experiences while serving as deputy secretary of state was something he observed close to home, during the 2024 Little League World Series in Williamsport.

The State Department helps bring dozens of teams from across the world with their families and trainers and coaches. The final game between the Chinese Taipei team and the U.S. team from Florida went into extra innings and ended in dramatic fashion, with Florida emerging victorious.

“At the end of the game, the Chinese Taipei team was really upset,” Verma said. “The kids were crying, and it was understandable. And the team from Florida, instead of running out onto the field to celebrate, ran out on the field and began consoling the other team, putting their arms around the other players.

“I just saw that and thought, for all the challenges we have in the world, there is a lot of good and a lot of hope and a lot of promise, and you see it in places like this, on the ball field in Williamsport, with these kids who are from two different corners of the world coming together.”

• Nicholas N Jacobs  /   [F Nicholas Jacobs]  /   [F Nicholas Jocobs]  /   [Francis Nicholas Jacobs]  /   [Nicholas F Jacobs]  /   [Nicholas J Jacobsk]

• Birth Date :   Mar 1947

• Residence Date :   2012-2020

• Address :   112 Washington Pl Apt 4d  /   Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA  /   15219

• Second Residence Date :   2008-2011

• Second Address :   1411 Grandview Ave Apt 508  /   Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA  /   15211

• Third Residence Date :   1996-2011

• Third Address :   2767 Carpenter Park Rd  /   Hollsopple, Pennsylvania, USA  /   15935

• Fourth Residence Date  :   1997-2007

• Fourth Address :   2767 Carpenters Park Rd  /   Davidsville, Pennsylvania, USA  /   15928

• F Nicholas Jacobs  /   (Nicholas J Jacobs, Nicholas Nicholas Jacobs)

• BIRTHDATE :   3/31/1947 (76yrs)

• Addresses

  • • CURRENT :   120 Glory Dr  /   Windber, PA 15963

    • 2767 Carpenters Park Rd  /   Davidsville, PA 15928

    • 112 Washington Pl  /   Pittsburgh, PA 15219

    • 1048 Johnson Ave Apt A  /   Newark, OH 43055

    • 100 Battle Ridge Dr  /   Atlanta, GA 30342

    • 319 E Market St  /   Cadiz, OH 43907

    • 611 Webb Ave  /   Cadiz, OH 43907

    • PO Box 3  /   Hollsopple, PA 15935

    • 331 Theatre Dr  /   Johnstown, PA 15904

    • 331 Theatre Dr # 1023  /   Johnstown, PA 15904

    • 1411 Grandview Ave  /   Pittsburgh, PA 15211

    • 1411 Grandview Ave Apt 508  /   Pittsburgh, PA 15211

    • 100 Anderson St Apt 333  /   Pittsburgh, PA 15212

    • 100 Anderson St Apt 738  /   Pittsburgh, PA 15212

    • 112 Washington Pl Apt 4D  /   Pittsburgh, PA 15219

    • 5060 Snowberry Ln  /   Lafayette, IN 47909

    • 111 Virginia Ave  /   Sharpsburg, PA 15215

    • 600 Somerset Ave  /   Windber, PA 15963

    • 100 Anderson St Apt 124  /   Pittsburgh, PA 15212

    • 100 Anderson St  /   Pittsburgh, PA 15212

• Relatives & Associates

  • • Nicholas Peter Jacobs  /   Age 50s  /   Pittsburgh, PA

    • Joanna J Martyak  /    Age 40s  /   Windber, PA

    • Angela Marie Perko  /   Age 60s  /   Santa Barbara, CA

    • Tessa Katherine Jacobs  /   Age 30s  /    Santa Barbara, CA