HJBR Jul/Aug 2021

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  JUL / AUG 2021 11 population of Louisiana. So, I wouldn’t take Cancer Alley to mean just one thing as it relates to risk factors. Editor Let’s talk partnerships. Mary Bird Per- kins is involved in several throughout Lou- isiana. How do you enter the partnership, and how do these partnerships better serve patients? Fontenot Partnerships have been critical to our organization. They’ve been a feature of how we deliver care since the inception of the center 50 years ago, and the reason is because cancer isn’t managed by a sin- gle doctor or specialist or treatment team. Cancer involves an array of tests and sur- geons and oncologists — not just one type of oncologist, but there are several differ- ent types of oncologists that a patient may need to see depending on their diagnosis. The types of treatments they receive are also extremely varied. Some patients receive sur- gery and radiation, and chemotherapy and immunotherapy is an emerging fourth pil- lar of cancer treatment. There’s genetic test- ing. There’re follow-up imaging studies. The array of services and programs that a cancer patient needs access to is enormous. Our ability, our role in the communities that we serve is to provide, to the best of our ability, a single and unified cancer resource to our patients so that they can get the easi- est, most ready access to any care that they need possible. In some circumstances, that means being treated and cared for by Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center doctors and staff. In other circumstances, we’ve part- nered with regional and community hos- pitals who allow us to extend services and bring the entire portfolio of cancer care into a community so that a patient can access it through a single point of entry. That’s complicated, and it’s not always easy to do. Behind the scenes, there are a lot of connections that have to be made between Mary Bird and our partners to provide a seamless experience for patients as they’re navigating from the Mary Bird environment of care to our hospital MARY BIRD PERKINS HOSPITAL PARTNERSHIPS Our Lady of the Lake Baton Rouge Woman’s Hospital Baton Rouge Terrebonne General Health System Houma partners’environments of care and maneu- ver through that in a seamless way. That’s our goal, and we think that taking that approach provides the best experience for patients — provides the best outcome for patients in a way that is efficient and cost-effective. Editor Mary Bird recently ended a relation- ship with St. Tammany Health System on the Northshore that will be taken over by Och- sner. Will Mary Bird Perkins be leaving the Northshore market? Fontenot Absolutely not. We’ve been on the Northshore for more than 20 years, and there was little or no organization of can- cer care services or programs that existed materially on the Northshore before we got there 20 years ago. The Mary Bird Perkins doctors were really the founding members of the cancer care community on the North- shore. We’re very proud of that. We’ve been in that community for a long time, and we’re going to be in that community for a very long time. We have deep roots in the Northshore marketplace. We enjoy a tremendous amount of support from the community. For the reasons that I mentioned earlier, the organization was founded 50 years ago with the intention of serving as a commu- nity resource. Every community that we’re in today, in every marketplace that we serve, we are there because we were invited to go there by the community. We have not planted a flag in the ground in any market- place. We’re there, because the community wants us to be there. And, for those reasons, we have built and earned and garnered and benefited from perception and recogni- tion from people in the communities that we serve as being their community cancer center. I don’t expect that to change in the Northshore, in Baton Rouge or in any other marketplace that we’re in. Editor Do you have an announcement about the Northshore facility? Fontenot Yes, our plans presently on the Northshore are focused on pursuing the same mission that we’ve pursued on the Northshore since we’ve been there, and that’s improving survivorship and lessen- ing the burden of cancer in any way that we can meaningfully do that in the communi- ties that we’re in. In Covington, that means, as we are moving forward, building a closer relation- ship with Northshore Oncology Associates (NOA) — Jack E. Saux, III, MD, James E. Car- rinder, DO, FACP, and FaizanMalik, MD, who have been on the Northshore for as long as we’ve been on the Northshore and taking care of cancer patients — now furnishing in partnership with NOA, medical oncology, pharmacy, infusion and laboratory services