2007 Cancer Annual_prod5 - St. Joseph Medical Center

The Cancer Institute
Cancer Liason Physician Annual Report
Maen Farha, M.D.
Cancer Liasion Physician
The Cancer Institute
In some ways, Cancer Liaison
Physicians (CLPs) are the guardians
of their medical center’s cancer
program. Each cancer program in
the U.S. that is accredited by the
Commission on Cancer is required to
have a CLP. It is my honor to be the CLP
at St. Joseph Medical Center during
the creation of The Cancer Institute.
has been implemented for breast cancer, thoracic malignancies
and gastrointestinal tumors.
The Cancer Liaison Program is a grass-root network of 1,600
physicians volunteers (CLPs) whose primary roles are to:
• Serve as the physician champion within the cancer program
• Serve as the liaison between CoC and the cancer program
• Serve as an agent of change within the community
The CoC was founded by the American College of Surgeons
in 1922 and has been inspecting hospital cancer programs and
approving those that meet its stringent standards. The CoC
reviews cancer programs every three years to determine their
compliance with its standards. Twenty-five percent of U.S.
hospitals are CoC approved, but they collectively care for
80 percent of new cancer patients.
MISSION STATEMENT
“The Commission on Cancer (CoC) is a consortium
of professional organizations dedicated to improving
survival and quality of life for cancer patients through
standard-setting, prevention, research, education
and the monitoring of quality care.”
St. Joseph Medical Center’s cancer program was reapproved
in 2005 and the CoC will be back next spring to evaluate our
program. We look forward to that with anticipation because
the recent expansion of our cancer program has already
begun to bear fruit and is making a difference in cancer
patients’ care. One of the most impressive initiatives is the
implementation of multidisciplinary prospective Tumor Board.
Specialists from multiple disciplines, including many types of
non-physician providers, confer to plan the treatment of our
cancer patients. The result is always superior to what we can
individually accomplish, since many minds come together to
share expertise and create a treatment plan that is always
rich, intelligent and abundantly detailed for each patient. This
This role has been an enriching and positive experience for
me. In this capacity during the past year, accomplishments
have included:
• Reporting regularly to the Cancer Committee including
sharing our NCDB data and comparison to national
benchmarks
• Working closely with tumor registrars and registry to improve
the quality and completeness of our reporting
• Establishing initial relations with the American Cancer
Society and inviting our ACS Liaison to our Cancer
Committee meetings
• Establishing initial connection with the State Cancer Control
program and inviting them to present an overview of the
program at our cancer conference
• Attending the annual meeting of the CoC at the clinical
Congress of the American College of Surgeons
What is the value of all that data entry to the NCDB and
the SEER database?
Tumor registrars from the 1,500 or more approved institutions
enter extensive data into that database about each patient
treated at an institution. To date, 20 million patients are in
the database with good solid data on demographics, stage,
treatment and survival. This is a massive amount of data that
can be “farmed” to answer questions that may otherwise be
impossible to answer in a scientific manner. Recent examples
are data analysis that showed that having colon resections
with larger number of lymph nodes in the specimen confers
higher survival rates and that resecting primary tumors in
patients with metastatic breast cancer is associated with
increased survival. Plus, there have been similarly difficult
2007 THE CANCER INSTITUTE ANNUAL REPORT | 5