The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has launched the three-year pilot phase of a new programme that will help bring state-of-the-art cancer care to patients in community hospitals across the United States.
The National Cancer Institute Community Cancer Centers Program (NCCCP) is designed to encourage the collaboration of private-practice medical, surgical, and radiation oncologists - with close links to NCI research and to the network of 63 NCI-designated Cancer Centers principally based at large research universities. Building on this expanded network, the NCCCP sites will explore ways of sharing information, via electronic medical records, to further enhance patient care. Evidence from a wide range of studies suggests that cancer patients diagnosed and treated in a setting of coordinated multi-specialty care and clinical research may live longer and have a better quality of life.
"Improving access to cutting-edge therapies, and providing simple and secure methods of exchanging medical information between health care consumers and providers are key issues," said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. "The NCCCP pilot program holds great potential to inform us of the best ways to expand the reach of clinical research and further the important adoption of electronic medical records at the community level."
The pilot program will research new and enhanced ways to assist, educate, and better treat the needs of underserved populations including elderly, rural, inner-city, and low-income patients as well as racial and ethnic groups with unusually high cancer rates.
"A key component of the NCI Community Cancer Centers program will be education," said NIH Director Elias A Zerhouni, MD. "Studying new ways to help patients and members of the community better understand the lifestyle issues that affect cancer risk could pay dividends for many diseases by implementing approaches proven effective by NCI's research."
The pilot will begin at eight free-standing community hospitals and six additional hospitals operated by health care systems. The sites will be funded for a collective total of $5 million per year. An NCI panel of experts and an independent group of outside experts will set milestones, monitor progress, and evaluate success of the three-year pilot and then issue recommendations for a full-fledged program.
NCCCP pilot sites will study how community hospitals nationwide could most effectively develop and implement a national database of voluntarily provided electronic medical records that would be accessible to cancer researchers. They will also study methods of expanding and standardizing the collection of blood and tissue specimens voluntarily obtained from patients for cancer research.
"It is becoming clear that one of the greatest determinants of cancer mortality in the years ahead will be access to care," said NCI Director John E. Niederhuber, MD. "This program will succeed if it can bring the benefits of our latest science to people in the communities where they live."