minimum— if not much more than that— to be able to get treatments,” Kroese said.“ Many times they have to do it every day of the week for as many as six weeks.
“ You know, there’ s different protocols, but basically, that’ s a real inconvenience for people,” he added.“ Because the procedure itself may only be a few minutes, but it’ s a big inconvenience for people to have to spend that much time on the road when they’ re going through a very traumatic situation anyway.”
DR. DANIEL KOLLMORGEN Mahaska Health oncology
Pella Regional and Knoxville Hospital administration hopes to have the hospital up and ready to go by 2027.
East of Marion County, Mahaska Health Partnership has been progressively developing the tactics used by its oncology department under Dr. Daniel Kollmorgen. Their efforts have resulted in the tumor board, a collection of cancer specialists and support providers who meet online to review cases. This in turn allows them to streamline the process and cut down on travel.
Ottumwa Regional Health Center.
to patients within the region, Radiology Director Lisa Garrison says their top priority in fighting cancer is early detection or— better yet— prevention.
“ We do some diagnostic tests here in radiology. Of course, our yearly mammograms are screening, and that’ s screening for breast cancer,” Garrison said. We do now have a low-dose CT, so it’ s a lung cancer screening, and that’ s an annual test that they come in and get an annual dose CT scan of their chest and see if there’ s anything that you need to watch out for.”
PHOTO BY CHAD DRURY
LISA GARRISON Ottumwa Regional Health Center Radiology Director
“ I think that with early detection, the cure rates are higher when you find it early and what we’ re trying to build at Oskaloosa— at Mahaska Health— is a resource and a network in an area to help … patients in the area,” Kollmorgen said.“ How can we streamline care? How can we improve decision making? How can we help get patients to where they need to go?”
Meanwhile, one of Mahaska Health’ s partners on the tumor board— Ottumwa Regional Health Center— is doing its part to fight cancer in southeast Iowa. In addition to providing radiation treatment
More recently, Garrison said they’ ve rolled out the Healthy Person Program at Ottumwa Regional, in which any person coming to the hospital to have any kind of imaging and a radiologist finds a nodule or some other incidental following, there’ s an electronic system that looks for and reports those issues, then follows up to make sure the patient gets the necessary treatment.
“ So if someone’ s in ER and has an abdomen CT and they see a lung nodule in the chest, a lot of times, that’ s not looked at in the ER because that’ s incidental— you know, it’ s not an acute finding,” Garrison said.“ But this system gives the report to their primary care provider, sends a letter to the patient stating,‘ Hey, this is an incidental finding. We recommend you have these tests,’ then … there’ s these guidelines that we go by.”
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