Pearlman Cancer Center

I wanted to tell you a little about our cancer center to give you an idea of our size and the types of services we offer. This may help readers relate more easily to our program and understand that what we are doing can be done in smaller cancer centers everywhere. We see 700-800 adult cancer patients each year. Our top four diagnoses are breast, colon, lung, and prostate, which is pretty typical. We serve around 250,000 citizens of south Georgia and north Florida, many of whom are from rural areas. During a recent four month survey period we saw over 1000 adult survivors in follow-up. We don't have a survivorship clinic, which would be ideal, but is not typical for smaller centers such as ours. We offer cooperative group and pharmaceutical clinical trials, typically enrolling 25-30 patients a year on study. In an effort to offer seamless care to our patients, we have medical and radiation oncology in the same clinic, so there's only one chart for the patient receiving multimodality therapy. We have our own lab, our own pharmacy, and offer the services of an oncology social worker, dietician, case manager, and reimbursement specialist under one roof. Our education specialist holds weekly classes for patients starting chemotherapy. We like all new patients to attend this 2 1/2 hour class before they start treatment. It gives them information not only about their treatment, but how to monitor their blood counts, when to call the physician, how to manage side effects of treatment, and how to contact the various service leaders in the clinic. She also introduces the concept of survivorship in this class. While the focus of the class is on active treatment, we wanted to plant the seeds of survivorship as the next phase of care, and that the focus will shift to issues that require a new set of resources. We'll use a similar format to create a survivorship class for patients completing treatment. We'll share that curriculum with you when it's completed. We're also in the long, sometimes painful process of converting to electronic medical records. I'm certain that after it's fully implemented, many of our processes, including some related to survivorship, will be greatly enhanced and the pain will have been worth it. That's a short introduction to our facility. Please share a description of your workplace with us as you join this forum.