Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center announced a partnership Tuesday with the parent company of Hartford Hospital and four other Connecticut hospitals, intended to bring advances in treatment to a wider group of patients.

Hartford HealthCare’s hospitals will become part of the newly formed Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Alliance.

The arrangement includes bringing Memorial Sloan-Kettering clinical trials to Hartford Hospital.

Teams from Hartford HealthCare’s Cancer Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering will work over the next six months to identify areas of focus, and will together recruit a physician-in-chief who will be on the staff of both organizations. In addition, Hartford doctors will become part of Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s disease management teams.

“Currently, the vast majority of cancer care in the United States is delivered by community oncologists, but cancer advances can take years to be adopted in a community setting,” Dr. José Baselga, Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s physician-in-chief, said in a statement. “We want to rapidly accelerate the pace of integrating the latest advances of cancer care into a community setting.”

In addition to Hartford Hospital, Hartford HealthCare’s network includes Windham Hospital, The Hospital of Central Connecticut, Backus Hospital, and MidState Medical Center.

Tuesday’s announcement followed a year of discussions.

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Arielle Levin Becker covered health care for The Connecticut Mirror. She previously worked for The Hartford Courant, most recently as its health reporter, and has also covered small towns, courts and education in Connecticut and New Jersey. She was a finalist in 2009 for the prestigious Livingston Award for Young Journalists, a recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship and the third-place winner in 2013 for an in-depth piece on caregivers from the National Association of Health Journalists. She is a 2004 graduate of Yale University.

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