HJNO Jul/Aug 2021

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  JUL / AUG 2021 29 the other pillars of oncology as well, is that about half of the patients that we treat, we’re not treating to cure them. In an increasing number of circumstances, cancer is man- aged more and more like a chronic disease. What that means in radiation is that patients are coming back to see us two, three, four, five different times, and it is being used to alleviate pain, to extend the life or extend quality of life even if we’re not “curing” the patient of cancer. People in oncology, we develop long- term relationships with our patients. And, as I mentioned, many of those patients are chronically ill, so you need to have people who have a passion for working with that type of patient population who are attracted to oncology. I think one of the common characteristics around people who are the most passionate about caring for cancer patients are people who had an experience early in their life with cancer touching themselves or a close family member or friend of theirs. I wouldn’t say that’s universally true of everyone, but if I had to really kind of draw down to the most common denominator, I’d say that the people who are most passionate more often than not have really been touched by cancer at a fairly early stage in some way in their life. Editor Earlier, you mentioned the relation- ship that Mary Bird Perkins has with LSU. How does this clinical/academic partnership benefit medical students and your patients? Fontenot I’ll note a couple of different rela- tionships that we have with LSU. The first is one that I mentioned related to national clinical trials with the NCI [National Can- cer Institute]. We are the CO-PI on a grant with the LSU Health Science Center in New Orleans that provides patients with access to leading clinical trials. That’s one partner- ship that we have with LSU. Another part- nership that we have with LSU is also one that I mentioned related to medical physics, and that is a collaboration between Mary Bird Perkins and the A&M College here in Baton Rouge at LSU. It’s specifically designed to support training, education and research in medical physics. There are benefits to both patients and students within that partnership. The benefit to students, which is where I’ll start, is that our students and trainees get to learn and receive their training directly in the community setting. I trained at MD Anderson. I had a terrific experience there, but I will tell you that academic medicine is much different in how it’s organized and operated than community medicine. It’s a fact that the vast majority of cancer patients will receive their care in the community set- ting, so I think the experience that our stu- dents and trainees get by being here not only exposes them to the major elements of oncology training in general but also allows them to experience it in a community setting that is going to much more closely resemble the one that they will ultimately practice in when they leave. Patients benefit, because what they end up experiencing as a result of the care that they receive is really the best of both worlds between the community cancer environ- ment and the academic cancer environment. The academic cancer environment is ter- rific — those are the MD Andersons of the world that do groundbreaking research and that are developing new therapies and technologies that their patients have access to that may not be available at most other programs. What the academic pro- grams can’t provide, which is what the community oncology programs provide, is a more personalized experience and touch that patients can access within their own communities. The benefit of the academic program that we have with LSU is that our patients get, I think, the best of both worlds — they get to experience that personalized touch of being treated by their neighbors, being cared for by people who live in their community, who understand the culture in South Louisiana, but they also benefit because we have this partnership with LSU, which has the pres- ence of research and graduate students in the department that allows us to create and implement groundbreaking technolo- gies that our patients can uniquely benefit from. And, there are several examples of new programs and technologies that have been developed, pioneered, within Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center that are being utilized to care for patients here and across our network. I think that is really a unique feature of our program. Editor Are you seeing an increase in false positives on mammograms for women who have received the COVID-19 vaccine? Fontenot No excess rate of false positives that we’ve observed or been made aware of at this point. Editor Are late-stage cancers being found due to the pandemic? Fontenot Anecdotally, yes, but even before the pandemic, going back to one of the top- ics that we initially started with is that Lou- isiana has a problem. Our friends, family, neighbors — collectively, we have an issue with getting people to go to cancer screen- ings. It’s not universally true, but relative to the rest of the country, we do more poorly with doing that. So, we were already hav- ing an issue with early screening patients, not getting it, and then being diagnosed at later stages. We have anecdotally observed a handful of cases where having taken screen- ings offline for a couple of months perhaps resulted in a diagnosis of cancer that was later stage than maybe it would have origi- nally been diagnosed in. But, that’s not data really, as much as it is just an observation. What I would tell you is that any time you study a problem or a trend with can- cer, you really need to look at it from the multiyear point of view. So, I think we may