Smart Approach Leads to National Selection

NCI Launches a Pilot of its Community Cancer Centers Program to Bring State-of-the-Art Cancer Care to All

June 2007 marked a major milestone for the Nancy N. and J.C. Lewis Cancer & Research Pavilion (LCRP).  On June 14, Atlanta Governor Sonny Perdue announced that St. Joseph's/Candler and the LCRP have succeeded in earning a tremendous honor for the state of Georgia.  The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has selected the LCRP at St. Joseph's/Candler as Georgia's only community hospital to participate in a three-year pilot for the NCI Community Cancer Centers Program (NCCCP).  Only 14 states in the country have received this mark of distinction.

The LCRP will participate in the pilot phase of a new program that, if fully implemented, will help bring state-of-the-art cancer care to patients in community hospitals across the United States.

The program 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.

Evidence from a wide range of studies suggests that cancer patients diagnosed and treated in such a setting of multi-specialty care and clinical research may live longer and have a better quality of life.

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.

The national pilot will begin at eight freestanding community hospitals and six additional locations that are part of national 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 accessible to cancer researchers. The sites will also study methods of expanding and standardizing the collection of blood and tissue specimens voluntarily obtained from patients for cancer research.

For more information about the NCI Community Cancer Centers Program, please visit the home page at http://ncccp.cancer.gov