HJBR Jan/Feb 2022

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  JAN / FEB 2022 13 MBP continued... Todd Stevens has been at the helm of Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, a nonprofit, community-owned organization, for 22 years. Stevens and the MBPCC board of directors share the fundamental belief that everyone should have local access to high- quality cancer care. He was instrumental in Mary Bird Perkins - Our Lady of the Lake Cancer Center’s participation in two National Cancer Institute programs – the NCI Community Cancer Center Program (NCCCP), which enhanced community cancer care across the country, and NCI’s Community Oncology Research Program, an initiative increasing access to clinical trials for Gulf Coast residents. Todd Stevens President and Chief Executive Officer Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center Dianne Hartley, Editor: Thank you for your time today to sit down and discuss cancer care in the Baton Rouge area. How do you feel the Baton Rouge area and Louisiana, as awhole, is doing in regard to cancer screen- ing cancer rate and cancer death rate? Todd Stevens: That’s a great question. I will give you just a little bit of recent back- ground. Just for your information, you can check out the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) “Cancer Facts & Figures.”They’ve got a tremendous PDF. The data that I’ll use when we’re talk- ing is from the Louisiana Tumor Registry (LTR) 2017 data. I do that, because it’s actual, hardcore, in-the-books data. The 2021 data you see on the CDC website and on theACS website are estimates. They’re really solid, but they’re estimates. If you see a bit of dis- parity between the data I’m going to men- tion and the data you’re looking at, that’s the difference. It’s important to know that, because data’s an interesting thing. In the Louisiana Tumor Registry through 2017, Louisiana, on the incident side, new cancer diagnosis is run- ning 4.81 per 1000; in the U.S., it’s running 4.42 per 1000. Louisiana’s population back in 2017 was about 4.6 million, maybe 4.7. If you run those numbers through an equa- tion, that difference from 4.42 to 4.81 applied to our population would indicate that there was about 1800 more cancer cases in Lou- isiana than you would’ve seen across the national average, if it was applied that way. That’s the incident story. Incidents are falling very slightly, both in Louisiana and nationwide, but the gap between that 4.42 and that 4.81 has been fairly steady for the past many years. One of the things that we’ll get into in this inter- view, is the things that Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center and other cancer-focused organizations across the country are doing to try to narrow those gaps and communi- ties all over the United States. On that mortality side, this is a little more telling, and it’s a lot more palpable data when it comes to why Louisiana citi- zens feel an immense burden from cancer. When you look at mortality, it’s 158.3 per 100,000 in the United States. Translate that back to per 1000, it’s going to be 15.8 per 1000 pass away of a cancer-related diagno- sis. And in Louisiana, it’s 180 per 100,000 or 18 per 1000. If you translate that back to the 2017 population and statistics, there’s about 1000 additional cancer deaths. We lose right around 9,000 and 9,500 people in Louisi- ana to cancer every year. You could make the argument that 8,000 to 8,500 would be the expected if we were on par with the rest of the nation. Now, when you look in the data and it’s really important to look in the data, I don’t remember if the cancer facts and figures from the ACS get into the parish-level data, but I know the LTR website does. I’d encour- age you to go to the LTR website, because they have a really great visualization tool where you can literally plug in parishes and ask questions and it’ll give you these great visuals about cancer in Louisiana by par- ish. If you do that, what you’ll see is that if you get into the populated areas of Louisi- ana, the East Baton Rouge Parish, Orleans, Jefferson, St. Tammany, Lafayette, Acadia, Allen parishes and parishes that surround the Northwest part of the state and Shreve- port, you’ll see that those cancer mortality rates are pretty equivalent to the national averages. You will also see, very strikingly, that as you look in the rural parishes across the state, you’ll see numbers as high as 27 per 1000 compared to 18 per 1000 for the rest of the state and 15 per 1000 for the United States. These disparities that are driving cancer mortality in Louisiana to be high, that burden is really coming from our parts of the state that arguably don’t have the access that they should to prevention, early detection, education, and then ulti- mately to early diagnosis and treatment. That is a really good foundational base- line for why Mary Bird Perkins cancer cen- ter focuses exclusively on three main vec- tors. We spend a ton of time on education and research. We spend a ton of time on diagnosis and treatment. Then, we have an incredible outreach and early detection and education arm that’s both commu- nity-based and corporate-based. As we go through the interview, I’d love to highlight for you the areas in education and research, treatment and diagnosis, and then preven- tion and early detection that we see going into the future of how cancer care is going