Cancer center will provide new treatment for patients in Hunt County

By Janelle Stecklein
Journal Staff

May 08, 2008 05:27 pm

— GREENVILLE — The waiting room is mostly empty now. The only occupants — a few new sofas and chairs.
But in about two months that will change. Hunt Memorial Hospital District officials predict the waiting room of the Presbyterian Hospital’s new cancer center will be bustling. By the late June, the new Lou and Jack Finney Cancer Center is slated to open.
Once the center opens, HMHD will be able to offer radiation cancer therapy for the first time in its history. The radiation treatment option will put Presbyterian Hospital of Greenville among elite company.
Currently area residents have to travel to Dallas, Mesquite, Tyler, Sherman/Denison or Paris to get radiation therapy. In June, they can get the therapy locally saving patients the daily, hour-long treatment trips to Dallas.
“That’s quite an imposition,” said James Sandlin, assistant administrator for medical affairs, of the travel.
“I think it was a real burden (for our patients),” added Mike Klepin, HMHD hospital administrator. “There was enough of a need and an outcry from the community that the hospital district felt (the need to build the facility).”
The lynch-pin of the new facility will be the state-of-the-art linear accelerator. The $2.17 million, 38,000 pound device will allow the hospital district to start radiation therapy.
The machine is housed in a room at the back of the 11,000 square foot cancer center surrounded by eight foot thick walls of high density concrete and lead and a thick door to contain the radiation, said Zach Wilson, HMHD’s owner’s representative, who is overseeing the construction process.
Physicists have been testing and calibrating the machine for the past few weeks to make sure the hospital is in compliance with shielding regulations and the machine will work properly, he said. The hospital has passed all the inspections, Wilson said.
“The point of it is to make sure the machine is doing what it is supposed to do,” he said.
Once treatment starts a patient will lay on the linear accelerator’s table. The table can move and machine will rotate for more accuracy.
“They get you on the table and they position it and fire away,” Wilson explained.
But the “firing away” aspect will be more accurate with this new machine, thanks to the On-Board Imager.
“It allows more accurate treatment,” Klepin said. The imager helps spare the surrounding tissue by taking minor variations in the size and shape of an individual area and focuses on the exact targeting of an area, he said.
“It’s a smaller version of the CT (scanner),” Wilson said.
The update cost the hospital about $600,000, but it’s worth it, Klepin said.
“This is technology that is available to our patients in Dallas,” Klepin said of some of the reasoning that went into the purchase. “Even though it was a little more expensive, it is the right thing to do. ... We are providing state-of-the-art technology right here.”
Another aspect of the state-of-the-art technology is a new $482,000 CT scanner that will be used by the cancer center to build treatment options, Wilson said.
“This is for treatment planning not diagnostic,” he said.
The hospital currently provides chemotherapy services to patients two days a week through a partnership with Texas Oncology, Klepin said. Texas Oncology, which practices in most Presbyterian Hospitals across the state, will continue to manage the hospital district’s cancer program, Sandlin said.
Radiation treatments will be offered five days a week and the chemotherapy treatments may be increased to three days each week.
“The volume (of patients) is just growing,” Sandlin explained.
Klepin said the hospital district had research firm Oncology Solutions come in and examine the market in 2004, and the firm said the cancer cases were expected to increase by 15 percent in the hospital’s service area between 2004 and 2009.
The study, he said, indicated there is need for local cancer treatment options.
Sandlin, a doctor himself who works closely with the other doctors at the hospital, said the center will be a welcome addition by the doctors as well as the patients.
“I think the medical staff felt there was an unmet need in the community,” he said.
Some of the patients, Sandlin said, have been asking if they can wait to get cancer treatment until the new facility opens because it will save them both time and money.
The answer, of course, is no, but it’s a positive sign to administrators.
“(The patient reaction) has been very positive,” Klepin said. “I think everyone is very excited about the opportunity to get it done here.”
And if the demand for cancer treatment increases like experts are predicting, Klepin said it is possible the hospital may expand its cancer treatment options and possibly add a second linear accelerator in the future.
The new wing, which will house the cancer center, will open in late May. The cancer center is slated to open in late June if everything goes according to plan.

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