‘One stop’ coordination for patients eases stress and wait time
SLIDELL – The promise made by Slidell Memorial Hospital officials almost 15 years ago to offer comprehensive cancer care at home keeps getting better, and the head of the SMH Regional Cancer Center says that much of it has happened thanks to the partnership with Ochsner Health.
Cancer Center Medical Director Dr. Matt McElveen announced that the facility on Robert Boulevard has again expanded the services they are offering, taking another step forward with a coordinated care program that began only three years ago in 2022.
McElveen has been the director at the Cancer Center since the doors were opened in 2011. In the 14 years of operation, the Cancer Center team took the center from treating most basic cancers to expand with something called a multi-discipline approach to treatment.
That means a patient who used to have to go to various doctors at different offices around the city, usually taking up to six weeks to finally get a diagnosis and treatment plan, can have it completely handled in one day at the Cancer Center by having multiple specialists rotate through the clinic on specific days.
“At first it was a little tricky since the docs are pretty busy already,” he said. “But now that we have it working so well, they love it and so do the patients.”
Now, McElveen said, they are expanding the multi-discipline program to cover more types of cancer. Originally the program treated breast cancer, but they have now added the same program for those with lung cancer, upper gastrointestinal cancer which includes, esophagus, pancreas and liver cancers.
“It was working so well with breast cancer I knew we had to expand it to handle other kinds of cancer,” he said. “Once you have a cancer diagnosis, it’s so comforting for patients to get answers fast.”
McElveen said that since the partnership formed in 2016 between SMH and Ochsner the Cancer Center has been able to greatly expand services for the community.
“Because Ochsner is a larger system and has resources for more things, they have been able to help us do a lot more with this program, and that has shown up in many different ways,” McElveen said. “Ochsner has really helped get all this done for us.” While still covering the cost of its own equipment and upgrades, SMH benefits from better pricing through its alignment with Ochsner, which has significantly greater purchasing power. In addition, Ochsner has assisted in bringing highly specialized physicians into the program.
“We now have an incredible thoracic surgeon, Dr. Jordan Dozier, who is in the clinic twice a month, as well as a gastrointestinal surgical oncologist, Dr. Andrew Newton. We never would have been able to have him be a part of this had it not been for the partnership with Ochsner,” McElveen explained.
McElveen said that when an individual is first told by their general practitioner that they likely have cancer it starts a super stressed time for the patient, only wanting a clear answer of what their future will be. However, he said, for many years that wait could last weeks since the patient needed to see a variety of doctors, such as a medical oncologist, radiation oncologist, and surgeon.
“All my cancer patients have always said the same thing—the worst part is waiting to have a clear answer about what will need to happen,” he said. “It used to be weeks, and that kind of wait can be brutal for them.
“Now, they schedule one day at the Cancer Center and come in when we have all those docs right here, taking turns seeing them. In most cases, by the end of the day they have a treatment plan in place and know their prognosis,” he explained.
McElveen said that once a cancer patient has those answers, “It helps them feel secure knowing people care, and that they are in control of the situation, even if it’s not the diagnosis they wanted to have.”
McElveen said they are already looking at adding colon and rectal cancers to the group of cancer sites treated through the program.
“We want to address the most needed cancers, and with this kind of program I want to keep moving forward as quickly as we can coordinate all the docs for each specialty,” he stated. “But none of this would be possible without the support of SMH and Ochsner together. They have basically said ‘tell me what you need’ even before I was ready for some things.”