Smart Approach Leads to National Selection
NCI Launches a Pilot of its Community Cancer Centers
Program to Bring State-of-the-Art Cancer Care to All
June
2007 marked a major milestone for the Nancy N. and J.C. Lewis Cancer &
Research Pavilion (LCRP). On June 14, Atlanta Governor Sonny Perdue
announced that St. Joseph’s/Candler and the LCRP have succeeded in earning a
tremendous honor for the state of Georgia. The National Cancer Institute
(NCI) has selected the LCRP at St. Joseph’s/Candler as Georgia’s only community
hospital to participate in a three-year pilot for the NCI Community Cancer
Centers Program (NCCCP). Only 14 states in the country have received this
mark of distinction.
The
LCRP will participate in the pilot phase of a new program that, if fully
implemented, will help bring state-of-the-art cancer care to patients in
community hospitals across the United States.
The
program is designed to encourage the collaboration of private-practice medical,
surgical, and radiation oncologists -- with close links to NCI research and to
the network of 63 NCI-designated Cancer Centers principally based at large
research universities.
Evidence from a wide range of studies suggests that cancer
patients diagnosed and treated in such a setting of multi-specialty care and
clinical research may live longer and have a better quality of life.
The
pilot program will research new and enhanced ways to assist, educate, and better
treat the needs of underserved populations—including elderly, rural, inner-city,
and low-income patients—as well as racial and ethnic groups with unusually high
cancer rates.
The
national pilot will begin at eight freestanding community hospitals and six
additional locations that are part of national health care systems. The sites
will be funded for a collective total of $5 million per year. An NCI panel
of experts and an independent group of outside experts will set milestones,
monitor progress, and evaluate success of the three-year pilot and then issue
recommendations for a full-fledged program.
NCCCP
pilot sites will study how community hospitals nationwide could most effectively
develop and implement a national database of voluntarily provided electronic
medical records accessible to cancer researchers. The sites will also study
methods of expanding and standardizing the collection of blood and tissue
specimens voluntarily obtained from patients for cancer research.
For
more information about the NCI Community Cancer Centers Program, please visit
the home page at http://ncccp.cancer.gov
