Stormont partners with University of Kansas Hospital for some cancer services

The University of Kansas Hospital will begin providing radiation oncology services early next year at Stormont Vail Health’s Cotton O’Neil Cancer Center after the two health care providers signed a partnership agreement Tuesday.

Stormont president and CEO Randy Peterson said the goal is to enhance and expand services to cancer patients in the Topeka area.

“I think we’re going to be able to raise our expertise so that more people can stay here to get treatment, which is our bottomline,” he said. “We want to be able to do as much as we can locally so people don’t have to leave our community to get care. This will certainly enhance that.”

As part of the new collaboration, Stormont Vail will no longer utilize its long-time provider, Radiation and Nuclear Medicine, for radiation oncology, although the local firm will continue to provide radiation services for the hospital.

RNM will provide radiation oncology services at Stormont Vail until Feb. 11, 2017, said RNM executive director David Smith. He stressed that only radiation oncology services will be affected by the Stormont-University of Kansas Hospital relationship. The group will continue to offer radiation oncology services at St. Francis Health.

The decision to leave the Cotton O’Neil Cancer Center was a difficult one, he said.

“KU (Hospital), once they decided they were going to have this partnership with Stormont Vail, they approached us about providing the physician staff here locally,” Smith said. “The thing that they wanted us to do was to work exclusively at Stormont Vail and that was kind of contrary to our mission of serving the entire community. We offered a proposal that we thought would have allowed KU and Stormont to receive all their goals but still allow our radiation oncologists to serve the whole community. Unfortuantely that was not accepted.”

Stormont Vail patients receiving care through the Cotton O’Neil Cancer Center will be able to choose whether they stay with their RNM physicians from whom they currently receive care or whether they want to switch to the University of Kansas Hospital physicians, Smith said. Cancer patients will continue to work with their medical oncologist RNM is working with Stormont to communicate to patients how the transition will work.

“We’ve had a long relationship with the radiation oncologists that are associated with RNM. We entered into discussions and had the intent that they could be part of this, but at the end of the day, those discussions just broke down and it wasn’t feasible to have them be part of the relationship,” Peterson said. “I feel bad about that from the standpoint that they’ve done great service for us, they’ve been high quality. But the situation just wasn’t able to be structured in a way that all parties were able to come to terms on that.”

Peterson said the relationship with the University of Kansas Hospital will offer options that patients currently don’t have in Topeka.

“One of the big things that I’m excited about is that we will have access to clinical trials through this relationship with KU (Hospital), clinical trials for radiation oncology,” Peterson said. “We have access to clinical trials for medical oncology because of the relationship with KU. The radiation oncologists will be part of a 15- or 16-member radiation oncology team that is not only doing treatment, but it’s doing reasearch. So we’ll have that cutting edge expertise and technology through KU’s research and development and their NCI (National Cancer Institute) connections.”

The University of Kansas Cancer Center received its NCI designation in July 2012, said Dennis McCulloch, spokesman. The center also has applied to become a comprehensive cancer center, the top designation from NCI, he said. The University of Kansas Hospital partners with the cancer center to provide clinical care.

The NCI website said there are 15 cancer centers, 47 comprehensive cancer centers.

Cancer patients from the Topeka area that travel to Kansas City for specific radiation oncology treatments, or even to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, hopefully will be able to receive treatment through Cotton O’Neil in the future, Peterson said.

“MD Anderson is a world-class facility, but now that we are an NCI-designated center, many of the same clinical trials that they offer are offered here,” McCulloch said. “Many of the leading edge therapies that they offer, that take a lot of training and a lot of understanding to do and to monitor side effects, are here.”

And now, Peterson said, those will be available in Topeka as well.

Stormont and University of Kansas Hospital formed a limited liability company so it is “truly a joint venture,” he said. Stormont is the majority owner and will be the managing partner handling the administrative side of the LLC, while the University of Kansas Hospital is the minority owner and will provide professional services.

Peterson said there will be no staffing changes, other than the radiation oncologists from RNM, at Stormont because of this change. The hospital already has the equipment needed by the University of Kansas Hospital physicians.

“The idea of clinical trials is using the equipment and technology that we have and utilizing that in a way that it’s truly a research-based trial,” he said. “In cancer, sometimes people have conditions that they say, ‘I’m more than willing to go on a clinical trial because that’s kind of where my disease has progressed to.’ I think it’s not so much equipment, it’s more the research-based techniuqe and then just being part of a bigger group.”

Cotton O’Neil patients will be asked if they’re interested in a clinical trial, which is voluntary, Peterson said.

Smith said he is confident many Topeka patients will continue to be served by RNM.

“Our group has been serving Topeka for more than 60 years,” he said. “Our doctors live and work here, and we’ve always been dedicated to the well-being of the whole community. On the one hand, we’re disappointed that we’re not able to continue to serve both hospitals, but we will continue to support both hospitals and continue to support Stormont Vail radiology services, as well as the nine other hospitals in the region that we serve. We’re going to try to make everybody the best that they can be.”

Contact reporter Morgan Chilson at (785) 295-5659.