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Community hospitals working with renown cancer-care centers

dana

Part of Dana-Farber Cancer Center, in Boston.

A  growing number of community hospitals are joining forces with such famed National Cancer Institute-designated centers as Houston-based MD Anderson  and Boston-based Dana-Farber to expand access to state-of-the-art oncology care.

And in an increasingly competitive market, association with a brand-name cancer center helps attract patients.

As Modern Healthcare notes, “Cancer treatments are increasingly complex and tailored to the individual, and the best treatment must tap into medical advances that harness the power of genetics or the immune system. That highly specialized knowledge is usually found in the nation’s pre-eminent cancer centers.

“Yet patients increasingly desire to access their care closer to home where it is less expensive, which matters a lot as the price of cancer drugs skyrockets and an increasing number of patients are in high-deductible health insurance plans. When community hospitals join forces with the experts at cancer centers, they can tap those resources and expertise for patients with complex cases without having to send them away for more expensive treatment.”

Thus such alliances can boost the operating margins of community hospitals in these very competitive times.

To read the Modern Healthcare article, please hit this link.


3 systems to share data for precision medicine

 

At the precision-medicine revolution rolls on:

Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, Stanford (Calif.) Cancer Institute, Renton, Wash.-based Providence Health & Services and precision- medicine firm Syapse, in Palo Alto, Calif.,  have created the Oncology Precision Network.

This will let them share clinical, molecular and treatment data through an advanced software platform to help find breakthroughs in cancer care by leveraging previously untapped cancer data while preserving privacy and security.

The OPN will link aggregated data between these three big health systems, to provide clinicians with previously unavailable information.

“By aggregating all of our real patient experiences, we will rapidly expand our ability to learn how to choose the best targeted treatments for our cancer patients based on the molecular profile of their tumor and our informatics based research,” Jim Ford, M.D., associate professor of Medicine and Genetics at Stanford and director of Clinical Cancer Genomics at the Stanford Cancer Institute, told Becker’s Hospital Review.

 


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