HJBR Jan/Feb 2022

CANCER WARS 22 JAN / FEB 2022 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE   MBP continued... Woman’s and other partners together just enhances care on those particular cam- puses. I don’t foresee or believe that the Mary Bird brand is a business tool. What I think of it is, is a kind of a... what’s the right way? It’s like when you go somewhere, and you trust something. What’s great about this is, Woman’s Hospital has an awesome brand, the Baton Rouge General has an awe- some brand, the Pennington Cancer Center has an awesome brand. It’s just one more way to say, “Hey, wow, Mary Bird’s involved in this, too. That’s even better.” And, return and vice versa. My hope is that we continue to leverage the relationships with all the partners we work with and their communities, because ultimately what matters is that a medi- cal community and patients among that community trust that their care is getting enhanced, that’s what matters; because then they’ll be more confident in the care they receive. So, I don’t think you’ll see a lot of changes there. I think you’ll just see more services available and better coordinated and with more resources behind them. Editor: BatonRouge General has ties with the Mayo Clinic. Will Mary Bird Perkins Can- cer patients get the benefit of second opin- ion throughMayo if they go to that facility? Stevens: Absolutely. The advantages of both the OneOncology relationship that Mary Bird has and the Mayo Clinic relation- ship that the General has together with the Baton Rouge Clinic, we will avail ourselves and make available to patients, anything and everything that will help provide more information about their diagnosis to make better treatment plans. The combination of the resources that’ll flow through OneOn- cology and Mayo Clinic and the unbeliev- ably sophisticated resources that exist here in Baton Rouge with the Pathology Group of Louisiana and all the amazing radiologists and diagnosticians that are in this commu- nity — we’re going to have more informa- tion than ever to make the exact, correct diagnosis. In cancer care, the most difficult part — from me getting to know hundreds of cancer patients over the years, by talking with them as they go through the process — is when they’re told they have cancer, but they’re not really able to be told very much information about that cancer. They just know, “OK, you have cancer.” Then, it can take two weeks, four weeks, six weeks before all those answers come to light about what the specific abnormalities are that exist and the biomarkers and all this other genetic information that drives the way the treatment decision is made. That period of time from being told you have cancer to having your treatment plan is ... I feel the most anguish frompatients when they’re in that zone, because they want to get started, they want to know what they’re dealing with, but it takes time. So, one of our goals is to collapse that amount of time, because we know how emotionally drain- ing and how difficult that is on the patient and their family to be in that zone of not knowing. The combination of OneOncol- ogy, the Mayo Clinic, local resources that we have through Woman’s Hospital and Gen- eral and Mary Bird and all the physicians on our medical staffs that support these organizations, I anticipate that we’ll be able to continually reduce and perfect that early part of the cancer diagnosis and treatment planning process that will really take a lot of burden off the patients as they learn about their cancer diagnosis and start treatment. Editor: Do you anticipate OLOL orMary Bird having a specific focus on a particular type of cancer? That youmay be known for treat- ing one type and the Lakemay eventually be known as treating another one? Stevens: That’s an interesting question. I think that could evolve. And, I think what would evolve in that case is that, to reach the level of expertise, we probably still would need each other at some level. So, I think the answer is that Mary Bird’s going to con- tinue, and — I think this is a cancer-industry- wide approach — everything is getting more and more sub-specialized. Breast cancer patients are seeing breast cancer physicians, patients with lung cancer are seeing physi- cians that are focusing largely on lung can- cer, etc. The reason behind that is that the explosion of new treatment techniques and knowledge and data is a daily onslaught of progress — and it would be impossible for a physician where, back in the ‘80s and early ‘90s and really through the early 2000s, physicians could kind of keep up with the bulk of cancer diagnosis and what new drugs were out there and what new diag- nostic tools were out there — but after the genome got mapped and all this data’s out there and molecular information is out there, it’s just created an explosion of new techniques and pharmaceutical agents and treatments. So, you’ll see everybody in the cancer care space focusing on what we call disease-specific care, and the lion’s share of cancer diagnosis — I want to say about 80% of it is prostate, colorectal, breast and lung — those four diagnoses account for about 80% of all cancer diagnosis. So, I think you’ll see all the cancer programs in the state and across the country really zeroing in on how to be awesome at taking care of patients with those particular type of diagnoses. Editor: Do you have your team in place? Stevens: Absolutely. We’re ready to roll. Editor: A lot of folks withmeans seek out sec- ond opinions or treatment plans and then get that treatment back home in Baton Rouge. Do you think the recent changes will make that more or less likely to continue? Stevens: I don’t think that changes. It cer- tainly doesn’t change for us. The physicians that we work with trained at some of the best cancer care institutions in the world, and they are patient-focused individu- als and some of the fiercest patient advo- cates that I’ve ever worked with. No mat- ter if it was at Anderson or AOR practices that I’ve worked with across the United States, if a patient needs a second opinion, they’re going to be offered one. If the physi- cian doesn’t believe they need one, but the patient asks and opens that doorway, they’re