Cancer partnership aims at improving care

Can less competition be a good thing?

In health care, the national trend is toward physicians, hospitals and other providers spending more time cooperating and less time beating each other up. The theory is that better communication and coordination will result in healthier patients while holding the line on escalating health care costs by reducing duplication and unnecessary services.

Doctors, hospitals and health care systems are gradually feeling their way toward the new model. One early example locally is the partnership between Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers and Penrose-St. Francis Health Services’ Penrose Cancer Center. A year ago, the two groups set aside their head-to-head competition and aligned their services, with Rocky Mountain providing medical oncology services, like chemotherapy, and Penrose providing radiation oncology, such as its CyberKnife system. The two groups actually traded some doctors, and some Rocky Mountain physicians moved into the Penrose facility.

How’s that working out after a year?

Doctors at both Rocky Mountain and Penrose say the partnership has provided tangible benefits, both for themselves and for patients.

“The patients have a more comprehensive experience, which hopefully translates into better outcomes,” said Dr. Tim Murphy, a medical oncologist with Rocky Mountain.

That “comprehensive experience” can mean a number of things: Rocky Mountain’s staff now has access to Penrose’s electronic medical records; doctors from both sides gather once a week to discuss cases and techniques; when the oncologists finish their jobs, they send patients home with treatment summaries for their family physician; and more patients are being put on clinical trials registries and patients are being seen more quickly.

“We eliminate redundancies and we’re able to streamline patient visits,” said Linda Julich, Rocky Mountain’s practice administrator for Colorado Springs. “It just results in patients getting quicker results, quicker treatments.”

“Quicker” is, of course a big deal when it comes to cancer.

“If you’re diagnosed with cancer, you want to be treated, like, yesterday,” Murphy said.

Having everyone under one roof can make a big difference to patients, said Dennis Bruens, director of Penrose’s cancer center.

“Cancer patients go through a lot,” he said. “People go all over the system.”
Penrose and Rocky Mountain show that independent practices and big health care systems can get along, said Dr. Jim Young, a medical oncologist who switched from Penrose to Rocky Mountain in the deal.

“We hope that those two examples can be models of creative ways to provide care going forward,” he said. “It shows an example to the community of how these things can be win-win.”

Since signing the affiliation agreement with Rocky Mountain, Penrose-St. Francis has also formed alliances with two groups of cardiologists; in those cases, the hospital bought the practices and signed professional services agreements with the physicians. For its part, Memorial Health System has hired groups of surgeons, hospitalists and several other specialists in the past year.