West Michigan Ca.docx

West Michigan Cancer Center
Program Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TERRY MCKAY: I would define a human services professional
as someone who

has a great deal of passion for human needs; whether they are
shelter, food,
health care, or whatever the need of the human spirit requires.
In my particular
profession, we deal with patients and we treat patients with
cancer. So, they
have a great deal of needs for treatment, but they also have
needs that affect
their family life, their everyday life, their work life. One of the
major drivers of
anyone who works with cancer patients, in particular, is
compassion.
There was a national search for a CEO to head up this
comprehensive cancer
center called the West Michigan Cancer Center, which is a joint
venture of two
competing hospitals here in Kalamazoo.
In 1992, the two hospitals Borgess and Bronson hospitals were
both in need of
very expensive radiation therapy equipment. Back then; each
piece of this
equipment would be costing over 1 million dollars. At that time,
the CEO of
Upjohn, the very large pharmaceutical company here in
Kalamazoo that is now
Pfizer and some other city fathers got together and suggested
that perhaps a
joint venture might be in order so that we would not have
duplication of very
costly equipment here in Kalamazoo. So, they came together
and they were
intent on building a joint venture and having a radiation therapy
center alone.

There was someone who went to national meetings and said who
is one of the
top five individuals in the business of oncology who knows how
to build a cancer
center and manage it and my name came up.
I got a phone call from Kalamazoo, Michigan, in Philadelphia at
my desk. And
they said, “Will you come for an interview.” I have to admit the
farthest and the
only place I had ever been in the Midwest was Chicago. I had
no idea about
Kalamazoo, Michigan. I had not even heard the song about I had
a gal in
Kalamazoo.
I have my undergraduate degree and graduate degree in business
administration
and my graduate degree is from the University of Pennsylvania.
So, presumably,
I could run any kind of a business. But there is no other
business than that of
taking care of cancer patients that I would want to embark upon.
(TERRY WITH ASSISTANT)
© 2014 Laureate Education, Inc. 1

How I got into the profession is I rather fell into because I had a
very close friend
who was in a position to recommend me for what turned out to
be the job of my
lifetime working for an internationally renowned cancer expert
in Philadelphia at
Hahnemann University who I worked with for 21 years and was
a mentor of mine
and taught me everything that I know about the specialty of
oncology and also
everything I know about how to run a business. So, I was pretty
blessed into
coming into that position and it was my passion and my
compassion that kept me
in this field of oncology.
The evolution of caring for a cancer patient has taken a very
long road from back

in 1992 when this was, this concept was first developed and of
having a
comprehensive cancer center with all services under one roof.
When we first
started, we had the basics. We had medical oncology,
chemotherapy, radiation
therapy. But, you know then there was some studies that came
out very early on
in the 90s about exercise improving and staving off recurrence
of breast cancer.
And, that kind of was the kernel of what more can we do for our
patients, what
more can we do to get their life back.
I was really intent upon having a cancer center not look like a
hospital setting, but
rather one of a welcoming large living room where people
would come in and feel
pretty welcome and pretty comfortable. So, the architecture and
the services that
we started with back in 1994 when we opened our doors was
very intense upon
treating the entire person, not just the disease. During that
treatment, we want to
treat them holistically. And so we started off with some exercise
programs and
from there we went on to the massage. And so we really do push
treating this
total person, treating the person psychologically, with
nutrition—we have on staff
a dietitian that the patients see for consultation, for help with
good diet and
exercise programs, we have cooking classes here once a month,
again to teach
patients how to cook healthy dinners.

It's not us giving them chemo, it's not them—us giving them
radiation. They are
doing the exercise, they're doing the cooking, they're seeking
out the
psychological counseling, they're going to Pilates. They're
taking control of their
own destiny. It empowers them.
We have a hundred volunteers here who have all been survivors
of our cancer
center who are the coffee cart ladies who go around and give
coffee twice a day.
We have clown therapy. We have art therapy. We have music
therapy. These
are all volunteers who have gone through their treatment here,
gone through that
scary time when they first entered our doors and they come back
because they
want to pay back, they want to give back to the patients.
When you have the diagnosis of cancer, it's a huge interruption
of your life and
you come here every day for radiation therapy, or you come
here for 6 months
for chemotherapy, you have a really strong lifeline to this, to
the Cancer Center,
to this organization.

My focus and responsibilities as CEO is to be sure that I have
highly skilled,
qualified staff taking care of patients, that I have the necessary
funding and
finances to support the mission of taking care of all patients,
regardless of their
ability to pay.
We are a not for profit organization and we have an obligation
to serve all people
of southwest Michigan in particular. And many of those patients
will come to our
doors without the wherewithal to pay for our services but are in
dire need of our
services.

We understand this is not something they planned to do. This is
not something
they elected. We really are pretty reasonable and working with
them and to pay
off their balance and on a time line that's comfortable for them
and an amount of
money that's comfortable for them.
Because we're not for profit, we take care of people who are—
who have an
inability to pay. So, we rely on fund-raising, we rely on
relationships where we
can get drug replenishment for people who are not able to pay
for the
chemotherapy drugs that are very, very expensive. So, we have
a lot of other
human service organizations with which we work because we
need to do that in
order to treat every single person equally. The primary
demographic that we see
here at the Cancer Center are senior citizens, so they're on
Medicare.
The second largest demographic that we service are what I'm
going to call our
pre baby boomers and they are or the baby boomers who are not
yet 65. This
generation is the most educated, certainly of the generations
that have gone
before, certainly the most demanding, and also have the highest
expectations.
And so when you are running an organization like the West
Michigan Cancer
Center and this group of individuals are diagnosed by cancer,
they have already

gone out on the Internet, they have researched everything that
there is about
their disease, they have researched every possible treatment
regiment that they
can go on and they come here armed with all of these print-outs
from the Internet
and have almost a pre-disposition of what treatment regiment
they're going to go
on. So it's really requiring a new set of skills by our physicians
to really deal with
this very well educated, well-informed, well-resourced
population. It isn't just,
“Take this and call me in the morning,” anymore. Our
physicians really go into a
great deal of explanation of why this, why this and what the
side effects are. And
it goes back very much, frankly, to our philosophy of treating
the entire person
I was not aware that there was a Lifeline Initiative available
through the
Kalamazoo Community Foundation and the Greater United Way.
But I had a
need and my need was that when I was president for the Susan
G. Komen
southwest Michigan affiliate, I began a program called pink
Saturdays.

Pink Saturdays is a program that offers free mammograms every
Saturdays in
October, which is breast cancer awareness month, to women
who are uninsured.
The women call an 800 number and they are asked a series of
questions
because these are screening mammograms. They answer a series
of questions
about their general breast health if you will, and also about their
financial
situation.
So they have the mammogram and the mammogram can either
be fine and
they're told, they get a letter that says the mammogram is fine,

no further studies
or anything needs to be done or they may get notified that it's—
they want to have
other compression films or they want to have an ultrasound or
they want to have
a biopsy.
We have carefully set up this program that the women not only
get the screening
mammogram but if they have any other subsequent diagnostic
studies that they
need done as it relates to their breast health, it's provided for. If
they're
diagnosed with cancer, that's also provided for and we get them
treated.
For three years, that program was funded. And I was coming up
on the fourth
year in 2010 in September, August/September of 2010 and my
funding was no
longer there to do this program. I could not let it happen that we
would not
provide this much-needed program. And so on a very beautiful
sunny day in
Kalamazoo, I walked myself down—I had an appointment and I
walked myself
down to the Kalamazoo Community Foundation and met with
Juan Olivarez and
told him my situation and I left there after a brief meeting with
this prince of a
man, and felt I'm probably going to be able to do this.
I was awarded the Lifeline grant. And not only that, but Juan
also worked the
telephones and I got some personal contributions and the checks
started coming

in. And I'm very happy to say that we did have pink Saturdays.
We've done
almost 1100 free mammograms to uninsured women.
What I used the Lifeline grant for was to provide for the
answering service to set
up, take all the phone calls because we get like 4 or 5 thousand
phone calls as
you can imagine, and set up all the appointments at all the many
facilities
throughout southwest Michigan and to do the advertising and
the promotions so
that women are aware that this program is available.
We did almost 2,000 drops of information all throughout
southwest Michigan.
These are individual drops to hairdressers, to Laundromats; to
any store who will
let us put our promotional materials and our phone number for
free
mammograms. So, it's a lot of manpower and a lot of getting the
word out. And,
frankly, getting the word out in a pretty short period of time.

This program will go on and continue to flourish because there
are now grants
being put in place right now for next year's program so that we
will be assured
funding. And, so, to date, we have done over 4,000 free
mammograms and we
have diagnosed seven women with cancer, five of whom have
been under the
age of 49 years of age. And those women have also been
successfully treated in
their own communities.
I think our future role in Kalamazoo is going to become more
and more
prominent. We will be covering and providing coverage for
patients way into their
80s and 90s. And it isn't—and more than likely, they won't die
from their cancer,

they'll die from something else. This is all spectacular news,
quite frankly. But the
challenge that we face because of that is that there are not
enough physicians,
not enough oncologists, medical oncologists or radiation
oncologists to really
care of those patients into their 80s and 90s because of chronic
illness like
cancer.
So, what we're doing to combat that is—and to prepare for that
is right now this
year, we're starting a survivor clinic. And, so, that survivor
clinic will be here at
the cancer center. If the patient chooses to be followed here at
the cancer center,
they also have a choice to be followed by their primary care
physician, and it is
our obligation when we discharge that patient from our service
because they're
going to have a long lifeline ahead of them, it is our obligation
to give them a
survivorship plan.
They will have a plan of what needs to be done to follow them
appropriately so
we don't miss anything in the future if they should recur or
relapse, and that
survivorship clinic is going to be staffed either a physician
assistant or a nurse
practitioner. And because the survivorship clinic is here on our
premises, if there
is anything questionable that the PA or the nurse practitioner
will be concerned
about, they will immediately go to the attending physician and
ask the question

and then possibly set up an appointment for the attending
physician.
We're a rather young organization because we're only going into
our 16th year—
so, rather young. But during those years, we really have become
the crown jewel
of the community and certainly what everyone points to about
the what
collaboration really looks like between two competitive
hospitals.
I think in the future, I think we're going to see a lot more
collaboration and
affiliation. Of course, we're very excited about the potential of a
medical school
with Western Michigan University, which will be phenomenal,
it will be a—
obviously, will be an educational, educational site for medical
students and then
we have—we already have their nursing students and their PA
students. So, we
would be a wonderful educational experience for the medical
students because
this is—they're going to become doctors and if they're
oncologists, they're going
to be practicing in centers like this.

I think you're going to see more and more very sophisticated
models of where
you can be very adequately cared for at home. This is all going
to be done
electronically by computers, by something more sophisticated
than Skype
certainly but in that vein. We're really on the brink I think of
changing how health
care is delivered and what kind of settings health care is
delivered in.
And I think in terms of fund-raising, I think more and more
grant writing and more
grant requests will be going out to agencies to provide the

services that we have
here. All of the complimentary services, the Tai Chi and the
exercise and the
massage and all of that, that is all funded by contributions and
grants, it's not
funded by my operating budget.
So, those programs keep growing. They're the expectation of the
patients for that
keep growing. I think also with the economy in Michigan in
particular and the
economy bouncing back rather slowly, I think that we're going
to see more and
more patients who simply don't have the ability to pay and we
will need to
augment that through other funding sources.
I was very fortunate to go into the not for profit world and I am
particularly more
importantly into oncology. There is no other business that I
would want to run, no
other specialty than oncology that I'd want to participate in.
I think working in the not for profit arena is very rewarding. I
think that taking care
of cancer patients has been extremely gratifying for me. I'm
particularly privileged
to be able to in some part provide high quality care for cancer
patients.
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