2009 Recap

How quickly this year has passed! It is hard for us to believe that this is the last blog post for our first year on the blogging circuit! We have enjoyed bringing this new venue of information and communication to you – our cancer center patients and interested community – and we hope that you have found it to be valuable too!.

It has been quite a busy and productive year for us at Holy Cross and the Bienes Cancer Center. We have continued to grow – both in terms of patient volume and size of professional staff. During 2009 we added new subspecialties and sub-specialists to our team including colorectal surgeons – Drs. Lescher, Basu and Schochet and added a new Hematologist/Oncologist Dr. David Drew who joined us in November from the National Cancer Institute. We added new technologies in our radiation oncology department including a new ultrasound based tumor localization system and a brand new linear accelerator with IGRT (Image-guided radiation therapy) and stereotactic radiosurgery capabilities. There is no cancer center in South Florida that has more technology than we do now! And we have maintained our high touch service along with the spirituality and faith based approach that we do with everything at Holy Cross. We continued to develop our disease specific focus for our physicians so that we have dedicated teams of physicians now who focus their practices on breast cancer, prostate cancer, gastrointestinal cancers, lung cancers and colorectal cancers. This specialization is allowing us to be the true leaders in our field that patients deserve and need.

Finally we have significantly expanded our clinical research program – opening the first community hospital based phase 1 clinical trials for cancer in South Florida. We are truly excited to be able to offer these new options to patients who have exhausted all other treatments.

Thank you for participating with us on our journey. 2010 promises to be even more exciting!

Tags: IGRT, image guided radiation therapy, phase 1 clinical trials, stereotactic radiosurgery

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Breast Cancer Surgery, Gastrointestinal Cancer, General Medical, Lung Cancer, Prostate Cancer, Radiation, Research and Genetics, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.