St. Joseph to participate in program to bring latest cancer care to

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Jun 15, 2007 by Steven Overly

St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson will participate in a three- year pilot program aimed at bringing the "latest and greatest" in cancer research and care to Marylanders who typically lack access to cutting-edge treatment, hospital officials said Thursday.

The National Cancer Institute Community Cancer Centers Program is being run through the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, and will allow patients at small, community-based hospitals to receive clinical trials of experimental cancer treatments.

About 1.4 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer each year, said Dr. Brian Cornblatt of St. Joseph's Cancer Institute, and only about 15 percent have access to the clinical trials being offered at 63 National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers nationwide. The only designated center in Maryland is at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

"If this works, this is going to define how the 85 percent of patients who are not located near an NCI- designed cancer center will get their care of the future," said Dr. Mark Krasna, the medical director of The Cancer Institute at St. Joseph. "We're really trying to design the paradigm, which hopefully will be replicated throughout North America."

The program provides $15 million to be divided among 16 community hospitals in 14 states. The exact amount St. Joseph will receive is hard to tell, said spokeswoman Vivienne Stearns-Elliott, because it will share resources with other hospitals in the program.

St. Joseph is part of the Catholic Health Initiatives, a consortium of 72 hospitals generally located in regions across the country where health care facilities are far away from each other. National Cancer Institute pilot programs will be offered at four other Catholic Health Initiatives hospitals - one in Colorado and three in Nebraska.

These five hospitals will share about $4.5 million, including $1.5 million from the National Cancer Institute and $3 million from Catholic Health Initiatives' new research and development department, said Debbi Honey, vice president for clinical operations.

"We don't have a lot of facilities like the one at Towson that sits in an urban area. - Our patients travel to get care," Honey said. "This is a good example of transforming how cancer care is delivered."

"Underserved" groups, including rural, inner-city, elderly and minority populations, will be targeted as part of the program, and interdisciplinary medicine - a practice by which physicians with different specializations, such as oncology or dermatology, work together to devise individualized treatments for patients - is encouraged.

St. Joseph has already implemented a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to medicine, including live video feeds that allow doctors at other Catholic Health Initiatives facilities to confer on a patient's treatment.

Just minutes before an afternoon news conference to announce the medical center's participation in the pilot program, the room was packed with doctors discussing a patient's condition among the grinding drills and banging hammers of construction workers building St. Joseph's new cancer center facility.