Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center's Norris Cotton Cancer Center has announced a new collaboration with New Hampshire and Vermont physicians which is designed to extend the reach of experimental cancer treatments to patients in local rural areas.
The program is the first to directly involve community physicians in highly sophisticated investigational treatments, according to Dr. L. Herbert Maurer, deputy director of the Cancer Center and director of the research project.
Maurer, who is an oncologist and professor of medicine, said the intent of the program is to link community primary care physicians with Cancer Center physicians to introduce investigational treatments into community hospitals. "Patients with cancer should know about clinical trials that offer them the latest advances in treatment," he said.
"Until now," Maurer said, "these state-of-the-art treatments have been available to patients only through major research centers and academic medical centers or where groups of medical oncologists are involved in Community Clinical Oncology Programs, or CCOPS."
According to Maurer, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center already has a large, well-established oncology outreach program that provides direct patient care and cancer education to portions of New Hampshire and Vermont.
But he said, "This program will make these treatments available to cancer patients through their community hospitals, close to their homes, with their own doctors being major participants in their care."
Physicians at 12 New Hampshire and Vermont community hospitals have already signed up to participate, Maurer said, and talks are continuing with other physicians in the area.
These 12 community hospitals are nowmembers of the Northern New England Cancer Consortium, a collabortive organization that will coordinate their participation in experimental or investigative cancer treatments with the Cancer and Leukemia Group B and the Cancer Center's Clinical Therapeutics Program.
Both the CALGB, which is headquartered in Lebanon and consists of 25 of the nation's major medical centers, and the Norris Center are nationally recognized in the field of investigative cancer treatment, Maurer said.
