Cancer is a team sport. So if you think a little bit about it, baseball teams.
You need pitchers. You need catchers. You need outfielders. You need infielders, and the only
way the team works best is when all of those components are working in stride together.
You want the best people in each of those positions
working together with one goal in mind and that is to take care of the patient in front of you.
The disease groups are really big tents. We want everyone to participate, and we welcome
new members. One of the things that COVID has made us realize is that we don't all have to
be in the same room to still interact and have very fruitful discussions. So,
so people are welcome to join in and join in to the tumor boards and present their cases
and hear what we all have to say or what we can do to to help with different aspects of patient care.
Really no matter where you are in our region, you have access to the MedStar Georgetown Cancer
Institute. You could be in Baltimore. You could be in rural Maryland, Virginia. You have access to it
through your MedStar Health system. And, we have a sort of hub and spoke model
where you have the critical multidisciplinary care of surgery and radiation and chemotherapy
kinds of treatments centered around some of our larger hospitals. But, we also have access to
many of the day-to-day treatments that you need at all of our sites around the system,
and we coordinate together. We think as one. We work as one. And so, our hope is that you
would have the same experience whether you're walking in here at Georgetown or the Southern
Maryland Hospital in Maryland that you would still experience the quality of care that the MedStar
Georgetown Cancer Institute is trying to bring, and we think is bringing to our entire community.
We have the breast disease group. It's really been a fun group to be involved in and to help co-lead
with Chris Gallagher from the Hospital Center and then also representation from the hospitals
in Baltimore and members from the other MedStar institutions. We also bring in our our partner
in New Jersey as part of the the breast disease group. The disease group really centers around
clinical trials, and it's been going strong for quite a while now, for five or eight years
or so. And, we really spend that time thinking about what are the best trials for our patients,
how we can bring them across our network and offer them to to our patients across the different sites.
It's a group that is, by its very nature as well, very multidisciplinary. So research occurs across
the different disease types, and we have a bunch of trials that are focused on local therapy so they
include surgery and radiation trials. We have trials in all aspects of early stage metastatic
breast cancer. We have screening trials. So, it really brings together all of the disciplines and
allows us to brainstorm and to help really improve the trials that we're thinking of bringing forward
and also to think about where we might have other trial ideas that we could foster within that group.
Not everyone in the system has immediate access in their hospital or in their office
to everything the system has to offer. Proton beam machines, clinical research, high-end interventional
radiology procedures, nuclear medicine procedures Not everyone has those at every spot in the
MedStar system. And so, it is really up to us to make sure that everyone's aware of the different
technologies and access and that people can access that simply, whether that's through our internet
servers, through our nurse navigators who can help coordinate this, or simply through our tumor boards
or CME opportunities where we make sure that we know what's going on out there so that everyone .
has access to the state-of-the-art care. So being part of the disease group is such an important
mission, I think, for all of us. And and for those of us who have been doing this for a while,
we keep on saying to patients that our standard of care today is based on yesterday's clinical trials,
and we want to be writing the standard of care for tomorrow and keep on looking
forward to the future. And, what we're trying to do here is really offer tomorrow's treatments
today.