Cancer patients at Wright-Patterson Medical Center have even more reason to trust the quality of the care they receive. The Commission on Cancer has conferred upon the medical center’s cancer program full reaccreditation status with commendation for three years.

The WPMC is one of only two facilities in the Air Force to be reaccredited, and the only one distinguished by commendation.

To earn voluntary COC accreditation from the American College of Surgeons, a cancer program must meet or exceed 34 COC quality care standards, be evaluated every three years through a survey process and maintain levels of excellence in the delivery of comprehensive patient-centered care. Three-year accreditation with commendation is only awarded to a facility that exceeds seven requirements at the time of its triennial survey.

During the previous survey in 2013, the WPMC cancer program met 32 COC quality standards and was given conditional accreditation.

“The purpose of this program is to review this cancer center and make sure it is adhering to excellence in care when compared to the national patient-centered guidelines,” said Lt. Col. (Dr.) Borislav Hristov, chief, Radiation Oncology Clinic, and Tumor Board chairman.

Lt. Col. (Dr.) Roger Wood, WPMC Cancer Care Center director, chairs the facility’s cancer committee.

“The committee is interested in ensuring that the hospital is providing excellent cancer care, cancer prevention and cancer screening to all of our DOD beneficiaries.

“We’re very pleased, happy and excited to give kudos to all the hospital’s sections that were involved in achieving this level of reaccreditation,” Wood said. “It was a lot of sections working hard and coming together as a team to achieve that. It’s pretty remarkable. It’s the first time we’ve had this degree of excellence.”

“We are at a gold level of accreditation which many programs covet,” said Michele Beck, certified tumor registrar and tumor registry consultant, 88th Diagnostics and Therapeutics Squadron.

The cancer program’s new status is more difficult to achieve as the expected standards become progressively more challenging to meet or exceed, Hristov said. More is being asked of cancer centers to adhere to various guidelines and practices, he added.

“We have been changing with the times as there is more of a shift to patient-focused measures,” Wood said.

Hristov pointed to staff members, including patient care navigators and social workers, who are an important part of patients’ care experiences. Such positions didn’t exist five or 10 years ago. It is important to maintain a multidisciplinary team for individual aspects of care, he said.

There is a more proactive stance being taken with the standards, Beck said.

“We’re trying to catch things like the patient’s psycho-social distress and making sure they are manipulating to all of their appointments better on the front end, rather than being reactive, so the patient has a better experience in their fight against cancer,” she said.

Hristov said some of the credit for the medical center’s latest achievement should go to its registrars, including Beck and Bridgett Wilson, for pushing the staff to meet or exceed the COC’s standards.

“We are able to provide excellent care to cancer patients; we certainly welcome new patients and we want to take care of them,” Wood said.

“This accreditation with commendation is an additional piece that can put patients’ fears to rest; we are delivering the best care out there that’s to be had,” Hristov said.

“With going a step above, a lot of treatment facilities find those requirements onerous; they don’t find them necessary. We feel they are integral and that cancer patients should be offered those opportunities and knowledge.”

When patients receive care at a COC facility, they have access to information on clinical trials and new treatments, genetic counseling and patient-centered services including psycho-social support, a patient navigation process, and a survivorship care plan that documents the care each patient receives and seeks to improve cancer survivors’ quality of life.

Like all COC-accredited facilities, WPMC maintains a cancer registry and contributes data to the National Cancer Data Base (NCDB), a joint program of the COC and American Cancer Society. This nationwide oncology outcomes database is the largest clinical disease registry in the world.

Data on all types of cancer are tracked and analyzed through the NCDB and used to explore trends in cancer care.

COC-accredited cancer centers, in turn, have access to information derived from this type of data analysis, which is used to create national, regional and state benchmark reports.

These reports help COC facilities with their quality improvement efforts.

The WPMC Cancer Care Center offers state-of-the-art equipment, like the Trilogy Silhouette Linear Accelerator that joined a host of other sophisticated radiation technology in 2015.

Next year it plans to add a large-bore CT scanner to accommodate larger patients and make possible more complicated radiation planning, Hristov said.

That piece of equipment will allow the CCC to track moving targets, such as lung tumors, in real-time and in all directions. A dedicated space in the center has been set aside for the 4-D CT scanner.

“That will allow for more targeted therapy so more normal tissue won’t be irradiated,” Beck said.

The WPMC may win additional recognition this year for the quality of its cancer care program.

“By achieving all seven commendation standards, it puts us as a candidate for the Outstanding Achievement Award (from the COC),” Beck said.

She pointed to the COC’s website that patients may use to learn more about WPMC’s cancer care program and all the services it offers at www.facs.org/cancerprogram/index.html.