Jun 15, 2020
Dr. Pennell and Dr. Jan Franko discuss Dr. Franko’s article, “Effect of surgical oncologist turnover on hospital volume and treatment outcomes among patients with upper gastrointestinal malignancies”
Hello, and welcome to the latest JCO Oncology Practice podcast, brought to you by the ASCO Podcast Network, a collection of nine programs covering a range of educational and scientific content and offering enriching insight into the world of cancer care. You can find all recordings, including this one, at podcast.asco.org. My name is Dr. Nate Pennell, medical oncologist at The Cleveland Clinic and consultant editor for the JCO OP.
I have no conflicts of interest related to this podcast, and a
complete list of disclosures is available at the end of the
podcast. Today, I'd like to talk a little bit about the impact that
physician shortages can have on cancer care in the United
States.
While there are some parts of the country, for example Boston or
New York, where you can't turn around without tripping over a
specialist in some field or another of medicine, for much of the
vast geographic expanse of the United States, especially outside of
larger cities, there's areas that lack adequate specialty physician
coverage, perhaps having either small numbers or even a single
practitioner covering large areas.
Now, this is very important for patient care because most cancer
patients get their treatment in community settings closer to their
home and not at large academic centers. But how does this impact
care when, for example, specialized surgical services are needed
and no one's available close to home?
With me today to discuss this topic is Dr. Jan Franko, chief of the
division of surgical oncology at Mercy One Medical Center in Des
Moines, Iowa. We'll be discussing his paper, Effect of Surgical
Oncologist Turnover on Hospital Volume and Treatment Outcomes Among
Patients With Upper Gastrointestinal Malignancies, which is
currently in press at the JCO OP. Welcome, Dr. Franco, and thank
you for joining me on this podcast.
Thank you for this opportunity, Dr. Pennell. It's my pleasure. I do
not have any conflicts of interest with this work.
Thank you for that. So we hear in the media about shortages of
physicians, especially in underserved areas. How common would it be
that a larger community hospital would lack access to, say, a
surgical oncologist?
Just to give you an example, the city where I practice currently
has about 750,000 people with surrounding suburbs. And we had a
shortage of surgical oncologists for about two years, where I can
recall that one of the large hospital systems lost entire radiation
oncology department. So for nearly two years, until they hired
three new radiation oncologists, they actually could not do any
radiation. We ourselves have been a flagship for many decades for
gynecologic oncologists.
We lost one about three or four years ago and since then we can't
hire, and then on top of that, I recall that about three years ago,
we had one year where 90% of urologists left the town. After 12
urologists, about eight or nine had to leave, and they came back
for different practice within the same locality. But it was about a
year plus without adequate urology workforce. So these things do
happen.
No, I could imagine, especially for specialties that are relatively
small to begin with. And just to put this in perspective, can you
explain a little bit about what exactly is a surgical oncologist,
and how does that differ from, say, a general surgeon who may also
do some cancer surgeries?
So thank you for this question. I mean, I myself am a surgical
oncologist. And I suspect there will be a lot of different
definitions. For me, it's would be a general surgeon who is focused
on a cancer treatment. General surgeons do treat both cancers but
also trauma and general surgical conditions, common gallbladders,
hernia.
But a subset of surgeons have focused on cancer. And the majority
of those have accredited fellowship. These surgeons, in my opinion,
should maintain a broad spectrum of practice. For example, not only
liver and pancreas but liver, pancreas, and stomach and esophagus
and other organs.
And what's also very important for them is to cultivate
multi-specialty understanding of how to transition the care between
an operation, systemic therapies, and radiation oncology so they
can maintain a momentum of cancer control and [INAUDIBLE] surgery
or avoid an operation. And when it comes to the question be able to
execute even the complex operations.
And given the complexity of cancer care these days and how
multidisciplinary it is, I would imagine that most surgical
oncologists are centered around academic university hospitals as
opposed to working out in more rural areas or community hospitals.
Is that the case or are they pretty much available everywhere?
So indeed, you are right. It, in fact, was published in the Annals
of Surgical Oncology around 2018 and 2019. An absolute majority of
surgical oncologists are centered at the university hospitals or
NCI-designated cancer centers. The number varies, but for example,
in Iowa, more than 80% of such a workforce is concentrated in the
single university center, which is outside of our town. And that
number ranges from approximately 65% up to 90% of surgical
oncologists working for the university, not the community
hospital.
That makes sense. If you were a patient who needed specialty
surgical care for, say, pancreas cancer or esophageal cancer and
you didn't have a hospital with a surgical oncologist nearby, what
do they usually do? Is this something that's handled by a local
surgeon or do they travel to academic centers to get that care?
So this is subject of lots of research. And I think there is a
dramatic geographical variation. And also there is a variation
depending on the patients and their socioeconomic status and
understanding of the situation. Plus, another question which is not
discussed, how long is it reasonable to travel? How far?
So I do think that complex surgical therapy should be done by
people who do have experience in that. And what is experience that
can be defined by number of cases, but does doing 10 pancreases
improve you in operating on the stomach as well, I would believe
there is some degree of cross-fertilization. Is it reasonable for
people to travel for an operation 100 miles, 150, 200? Probably not
reasonable, as long as they get a quality care closer to home.
Yeah. It certainly would put a burden on them, and you could think
that their follow up care might be compromised by being so far away
as well.
Yeah. I agree with that. One has to understand that the discharge
from the hospital after operation by far doesn't mean end of the
surgical care or at least it should not. Patients are these days
discharged from operations very quickly. Various tricks, sometimes
surgeons let them stay in the town in a hotel, which I don't know
how good discharge that is.
But then they're coming back for unexpected postoperative either
complications or troubles, which do not amount to major
complications, that has to be readily available. So there are
mechanisms how people can do that, but can you really do it on a
distance of 100 miles?
With that in mind, can you take us through your study? What were
you trying to show?
Thank you. This was almost classical before-and-after study. But it
was not only before or after but was before the last surgical
oncologist and the short period of time that we didn't have it. And
the largest period of time when we actually regained surgical
oncologist, which is how I came to the local practice. And I'm
still practicing here for about 12 years.
So the whole study spanned over about 15 years, between 2001 and
2015, and looked at the patients who are typically taken care of by
a surgical oncologist and not focusing on the technically rather
simpler procedures on, let's say, skin cancer. So we focused here
because of complexity and inherent risk on the esophagus cancer,
gastric cancer, and pancreatic cancer.
For reason of this study we looked at carcinomas only and excluded
neuroendocrine tumor, benign conditions, gastrointestinal stromal
tumors, and others. And we only focused on those conditions which
could be potentially resectable, because otherwise there is no
practical influence of surgical oncologist for a majority of
therapy.
So for esophagus and gastric cancer, we looked at stage I through
III and for pancreatic cancer on stage I to II. Stage III, in
general, historically was never considered for an operation. Might
be changing currently, but it was not in the past.
So in 2006, our prior very excellent surgical oncologist simply
retired. And the next two years, very clearly, there was no
surgical oncologist in the hospital. And they observed the
proportion of these diagnoses, and they observed that during the
time that there was no identifiable surgical oncologist responsible
for advising and executing surgical care on those patients, the
number of referral cases dropped dramatically down.
Some went down from about 12.2% of these cancers diagnosed within
this hospital as compared to the state, to down to only about 6.7%
of all state cancers being diagnosed in that particular hospital,
which at that time was missing surgical oncologist.
Once the new surgical oncologist, which was myself coming back, was
able to restore those services or perhaps the confidence of
referring physicians and the society at large better, and it
returned back to the prior numbers, again diagnosing and treating
approximately 12% of the state volume of these neoplasms.
We also wanted to see if we could not compare that to SEER database
within the state of Iowa, that we obviously asked the question, did
the number of these cancers for those two years somehow decrease in
the state of Iowa? And it did not. So at the state level, there was
maintaining of the trend of the annual diagnoses, but in the
particular hospital they were not apparent there.
So we assumed that they out-migrated to other institutions. And
empirically and by discussion by other physicians who were here in
this time, they clearly out-migrated to different systems and out
of town. They were simply not present with this hospital.
We looked at the overall survival as perhaps the most important
measure of efficacy of therapy. And we were able to restore the
surgical oncology quality to the point that survival after the new
surgical oncologist came was not worse, perhaps even improved in
some situations.
And there also was more of a higher proportion of patients
undergoing multidisciplinary therapy. That means either
chemotherapy or radiation or combination of those in addition to
surgery. That will be expected general trend over the last 15 or 20
years, but it was very reassuring. We could actually see it to be
restored back once the surgical oncologist services became
available.
And how well do you think the overall state SEER numbers reflect
the real results that you would see in your patient population
there?
I think it reflects very tightly about the reality. Now, SEER has
been demonstrated on a nationwide level to be very effective and
very precise with a very low rate of the errors. Interestingly, and
many don't know that Iowa was one of the original states where the
SEER Database has been established and participated in the program
since 1973.
And to some degree, it could be driven by the fact that there are
not too many hospitals which actually have cancer registry. So in
reality, you don't have to train that many registrars. But those
registrars and individual cancer centers actually support both the
SEER Database and other databases, including the National Cancer
Database.
So there is historically, for perhaps some nearly 50 years, of
consistent reporting of data. So I have a lot of trust in the data
reported, especially from Iowa.
In the paper, I noted that you, over time, as we get closer to the
modern time, that the outcomes seem to improve. At least compared
to the time before the previous surgical oncologist was there, is
that because the new surgeon was more skilled or is it that
outcomes just overall are improving as we move on and have new
treatments?
I think it's completely explained by the overall improvement of
care of the years and multidisciplinary treatment. I had a distinct
pleasure to, for about two or three operations, operate with a
surgeon who continues to work in Iowa-- he's in mid 70s-- in the
minor procedures, and that's an excellent surgeon. Definitely could
observe it. So while many people like to think that it is because
of one person or one surgeon, there's not one surgeon. It is really
the whole system maintain adequacy compared to improvements, which
we experienced over the last 15 years in the care overall. So I
think it's the whole team, as it would be expected, gets better
over time.
I think you did a very nice job of illustrating the major impact
that losing a surgical oncologist has on our health system.
Dramatic changes in the numbers of patients treated over time. So
is there a message that health systems who maybe have only one or a
couple specialists in various fields can take from this? How should
they be addressing potential loss of their relatively small numbers
of crucial specialists?
I think this is great point, and all that I can advise would be
consideration and planning. And while I do think that some
specialties with low frequency of practitioners, like surgical
oncology, are at risk, there are many other specialties.
And, in fact, every single specialty could be at some degree of
risk, because a medical oncologist, the level of the knowledge
which is required to practice with all the molecular studies and
immunotherapies is enhancing, essentially doubling every year or
two. So sub-specialization within even medical radiation oncology
is also ongoing.
So I think every health care system is at a risk of losing some
portion of its common skill if a key individual is to leave. So
surprisingly, as I mentioned at the early parts of our podcast, we
actually lost, not in our hospital but in another large hospital,
an entire group of radiation oncologists. Hard to believe that it
occurs in a city of 750,000. But it did happen.
So I think that planning and perhaps more research and attention
into who delivers care, not only how, but who delivers the care,
into how do we cultivate our cadre of nurses, physicians, nurse
practitioners, or extenders, it becomes extremely important,
perhaps at least as important as the buildings, because it's really
the professionals who create the program.
And those gaps-- you know, I definitely experienced this gap. I
came and I thought I would take over a working practice. There was
no practice. That is not necessarily important about me, but what
about the community which actually experienced this decline?
And I would submit that every health care system in some form or
another, whether large or small, is in some degree of a risk if
they do not address the planning, career transition of the services
which are often perceived as granted and available until those who
do them are actually not present.
Dr. Franko, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Thank you very much, Dr. Pennell. It was my pleasure.
And for the listeners out there, until next time, thank you for
listening to this JCO Oncology Practice podcast. If you enjoyed
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This is Dr. Nate Pennell for the JCO Oncology Practice signing
off.