Bucks hospital gears up for cancer care
St. Mary Medical Center is spending $13.2 million to offer treatment near home.
Officials at St. Mary Medical Center said yesterday that they were spending $13.2 million on five new high-tech reasons for Bucks County residents to get cancer care near home instead of in Philadelphia.
The Langhorne hospital also has hired a breast surgeon, Andrea Barrio, to replace Beth DuPree, who left St. Mary to become chief executive officer and medical director of the Comprehensive Breast Institute at DSI of Bucks County. Doctors at that for-profit center, which is well-stocked with equipment itself and about a 15-minute drive from St. Mary in Bensalem, focus on breast cancer and cosmetic procedures.
St. Mary leaders said yesterday's news conference had nothing to do with the Breast Institute's opening in April. They said St. Mary was responding to community demand for cancer treatment.
The number of cancer patients seeking care at St. Mary has increased 40 percent, to 350, in two years, said Patrick Knaus, vice president of strategy and business development. While the Breast Institute has the potential to siphon away some patients, he said, "we haven't really felt their impact yet."
Robert Cardinale, St. Mary's medical director of radiation oncology, said his goal was to provide the kind of care patients would get in an academic medical center "in an environment very friendly to the patient. . . . We can give care that's absolutely top-notch, and we can do it close to the patient's home."
This year, the hospital has acquired a wide-bore computed tomography imaging system; high-dose-rate brachytherapy, a way to place a dose of radiation inside a tumor; PET/CT, an imaging system that combines pictures of a patient's anatomy with information on metabolic functioning; and a RapidScreen computer-aided detection tool, which helps radiologists find early-stage lung cancer.
Within a few months, St. Mary will have a TomoTherapy Highly Integrated Adaptive Radiotherapy system that allows more precise targeting of radiation.
Barrio, who will begin work Aug. 1, completed a breast-surgery fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She went to medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"I believe that this is going to be the best breast cancer center in Bucks County," she said yesterday.