COVINGTON – St. Tammany Health System, in collaboration with St. Tammany Cancer Center, a campus of Ochsner Medical Center, has been re-accredited by the Commission on Cancer (CoC), a quality program of the American College of Surgeons. This voluntary re-accreditation, which requires adherence to 34 quality care standards, is valid for three years.
To earn voluntary CoC accreditation, a cancer program must be evaluated every three years through a survey process and maintain levels of excellence in the delivery of comprehensive patient-centered care.
Central to the CoC accreditation is St. Tammany Cancer Center’s multidisciplinary approach to treating cancer as a complex group of diseases that requires consultation among surgeons, medical and radiation oncologists, radiologists, pathologists and other cancer specialists. This multidisciplinary partnership results in improved patient care.
A partnership between St. Tammany Health System and Ochsner Health, St. Tammany Cancer Center is housed in a purpose-built facility designed to function as a one-stop destination delivering world-class cancer care close to home for Northshore residents. Currently, more than 50 physicians in 18 specialties are credentialed to provide specialized care to the community at the center. This broad subspecialization is key to providing a multidisciplinary team of healthcare professionals who, along with a strong support team, work collaboratively on improving diagnosis to treatment times and improved patient outcomes.
“This re-accreditation is just further validation and confirmation that St. Tammany Health System, along with its partner Ochsner Health, has implemented a model that is patient-centric with an emphasis on several different physician disciplines collaborating simultaneously in a specialized approach,” Vice President of Cancer Services Jack Khashou said. “A change from traditional model, in addition to medical and radiation oncologists, the approach also includes other medical and surgical specialists as well as psychologists who are supported by a team of advanced practice providers, integrative oncologists, registered dieticians, nurse navigators, social workers, physical, occupational and speech therapists and acupuncture. St. Tammany Health System has been continually evolving the model of care since it received its first CoC accreditation in 1995, and we are proud to have earned this most recent recognition”.
The CoC Accreditation Program provides the framework for St. Tammany Health System to improve its quality of patient care through various cancer-related programs that focus on the full spectrum of cancer care including prevention, early diagnosis, cancer staging, optimal treatment, rehabilitation, life-long follow-up for recurrent disease, and end-of-life care. When patients receive care at a CoC facility, they also have access to information on clinical trials and new treatments, genetic counseling, and patient centered services including psycho-social support, a patient navigation process, and a survivorship care plan that documents the care each patient receives and seeks to improve cancer survivors’ quality of life.
Like all CoC-accredited facilities, St. Tammany Health System maintains a cancer registry and contributes data to the National Cancer Data Base (NCDB), a joint program of the CoC and American Cancer Society. This nationwide oncology outcomes database is the largest clinical disease registry in the world. Data on all types of cancer are tracked and analyzed through the NCDB and used to explore trends in cancer care. CoC-accredited cancer centers, in turn, have access to information derived from this type of data analysis, which is used to create national, regional, and state benchmark reports. These reports help CoC facilities with their quality improvement efforts.
The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 1.7 million cases of cancer will be diagnosed in 2018. There are currently more than 1,500 CoC-accredited cancer programs in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, CoC-accredited facilities diagnose and/or treat more than 70 percent of all newly diagnosed patients with cancer. When cancer patients choose to seek care locally at a CoC-accredited cancer center, they are gaining access to comprehensive, state-of-the-art cancer care close to home.