O'Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center Magazine Spring 2020 | Page 17

CONNECTING THE DOTS
By Anna Waters
Patients are often expected to fully understand
the complex structure of their provider’s medical
institution, the various treatments and therapies
that are available to them and how to navigate through
this system on their own in order to, ultimately, get the
right treatment from the right specialists at the right
time.
These are the problems UAB aims to solve with what
it calls the Cancer Service Line – an operative clinical
mechanism for treating cancer that seeks to improve
the experiences of patients over the lifetime of their
care.
“A young woman with breast cancer does not want to
come in on Monday to see the radiation oncologist, then
come on Wednesday to see the medical oncologist,
then come on Friday to see the surgical oncologist, just
to get a slightly different story from each one of them
and miss three days of work,” said Barry Sleckman, M.D.,
Ph.D., director of the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer
Center at UAB.
A big part of Sleckman’s job as the director of the
O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center is to spearhead
its research enterprise, but it is also to ensure that
patients are properly and effectively treated when they
need it most.
“When you have three doctors in a room together, you
know there’s a consensus of opinion, and you feel like
everyone agrees, which they do,” Sleckman said. “When
you talk to all three of them separately, you may actually
get the same conclusion from each of them, but it will
sound different, depending on the kind of specialist
you’re talking to.
“That was really the start of the idea that all cancer care,
most of which is multidisciplinary, should be done in
a team approach. Service lines started in a very carecentric
way.”
The Cancer Service Line originally evolved at UAB
in early 2018 and serves as the operational arm
responsible for the delivery of cancer care within UAB
Medicine and throughout the entire UAB Health System.
Although the Cancer Service Line and the O’Neal
Comprehensive Cancer Center share similar clinical
and academic goals, as well as many of the same
faculty and staff, a sense of separation has historically
existed between the two. This separation is due, at
least in part, to the inherent differences between the
organizational structure of the University, which houses
the research-oriented Cancer Center, and that of the
UAB Health System, which houses the patient-facing
service line.
“If you are diagnosed with cancer and
aren’t sure what to do next, it’s OK.
You don’t have to know exactly what to
do. You just have to know where to go.
And if you have the option to go to the
NCI-designated O’Neal Comprehensive
Cancer Center at UAB, where you’d
have access to the best multidisciplinary
cancer care and the latest cutting-edge
trials, you should know that it matters
where you go first.”
— Barry P. Sleckman, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, O’Neal Comprehensive
Cancer Center at UAB
But now, in a game-changing effort to marry its clinical
and research missions and to further reduce the
burden of care for patients, the UAB Health System has
revamped the Cancer Service Line and is working to
wholly integrate it into the O’Neal Cancer Center, which
will require transcending the traditionally independent
structures of the two entities.
To help bridge that gap, Warner K. Huh, M.D., director
of the UAB Division of Gynecologic Oncology and
senior scientist at the Cancer Center, was named senior
medical officer of the Cancer Service Line in 2019.
“We felt that in order for the O’Neal Cancer Center
to fully excel and have an impact on the community
it serves, the clinical care, research, education and
advocacy pieces of our mission needed to come
together under the same roof, so that, operationally, all
things cancer are aligned under the Cancer Center,”
Huh said.
Huh says that access to care and timeliness of care are at
the top of the Cancer Service Line’s priorities.
“It’s imperative to have processes that allow patients
who want or need to be seen at UAB to do so in an
expeditious manner with unfettered access to our
specialists, especially if those patients are already part
of the UAB community,” Huh said. “What differentiates
us from our community partners is the disease-specific
expertise of our specialists and the unparalleled access
to them that we can provide for UAB employees and for
the community at large.”
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