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By JessiCa salernO
Changing the game
Health professionals in Central Ohio continue to create new opportunities when it comes to patient treatment and care.
illustration: Š2017 thinkstock
every day throughout Columbus, health care professionals are working toward a goal. The goal varies depending on the hospital, outpatient center or even mobile unit, but they all share a relentless pursuit of innovation in patient treatment and care. We asked professionals around the city to share the exciting medical developments they’re working on.
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“Exciting” is exactly the word Dr. Dean Lee uses to describe his research in cancer immunotherapy, which is the use of the body’s immune system to treat cancer. Lee is the director of the Cellular Therapy and Cancer Immunotherapy Program, a partnership between Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. Many cancers block the body’s natural immune system response, which allows the tumor to grow and spread. Lee says when it comes to the program’s research so far, dramatic advancement has been made in creating antibodies that lock the cancer’s ability to interfere with the immune system. Another area of promise is genetic engineering to direct a patient’s immune cells against cancer. This involves engineering T cells collected from the patient’s blood to produce special surface receptors that recognize a specific protein on the surface of the cancer cells. The T cell then kills the cancer cell the moment that protein is identified.
ConneCting with the Community Making a primary care office profitable in a
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medically underserved community is challenging, says Dr. Doug Knutson, OhioHealth’s system vice president of academic affairs and chief academic officer. The Wellness on Wheels mobile health unit, a partner program of OhioHealth and Huntington Bank, aims to solve that problem. Parked next to the Hilltop YMCA three days a week since January, the semi-trailer unit aims to act as a primary care resource, lessening the community’s number of ER visits, says unit director Dr. Krisanna Deppen. The unit allows OhioHealth to observe the demographics and health issues of the area while establishing trust with residents. This data will help direct plans for a potential, sustainable primary care office in the future. Giving patients the resources they need can also mean home visits, as Dr. Joe Gesky, vice president of medical affairs at OhioHealth, has been doing for the past two years. His program enrolls patients with limited health literacy in home educational sessions, during which Gesky and two nurses teach the patients about their illnesses, medicines and how to stay out of the hospital. “There’s been data to suggest [that] in primary care, only about one minute of a health
care visit is truly spent around education,” Gesky says. “So we have illnesses that alter people’s lives, and then [we] spend a short amount of time educating patients in a manner that’s directed by us rather than being patient-centric.” Gesky has visited about 100 patients so far. He urges health care workers to remain sympathetic to people with tenuous situations in their lives; members of this group often are more likely to have low health literacy.
advanCement in radiation treatments A CT scan is a common tool prescribers use to learn more about what’s going on in a patient’s body. But children with conditions who visit the hospital regularly receive a higher number of CT scans than normal, putting them at greater risk for related issues as they grow up. Dr. Katherine Deans is part of a team at Nationwide Children’s that developed a tool, called DoseWizard, designed to address this issue. It’s software that assesses the patientlevel radiation dose from the CT scan and merges the results with clinical data from the patient’s electronic health record.
photo: courtesy ohiohealth
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PhysiCal sPaCes that aid in Care The new Upper Arlington Rehabilitation Center was designed with one overarching intention. “Our goals were about the experience for patients,” says David Rupp, OhioHealth’s director of neurological rehabilitation services. That includes an overhead harness system, screens to test visual perception, gaming technology, a home to simulate everyday tasks and more. Open since January, the new facility can see about 95 patients, Rupp says, which is 10 more than the old space on Larwell Drive. Most of the center’s patients have suffered
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a stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, vestibular disorders, concussion issues and traumatic brain injuries. “People come here for the therapy,” Rupp says. “The space, facility and equipment help support these therapists [so patients can] achieve their goals in a much more efficient way.” Using physical spaces to support those affected by health treatment is something Riverside Methodist Hospital has taken to heart with their new Ronald McDonald Room. It’s a space where families with babies in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, can go to unwind from the stress but still be close to their loved ones.
“It’s more than caring for the baby at the NICU; we’re caring for the entire family while they’re here and making sure they have everything they need,” says Brian Jepson, president of Riverside. The area is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily and is staffed with Ronald McDonald House volunteers. Amenities include a washer, dryer, television, play area for children, showers, computers, desks and more to give families a home-away-from-home feeling when they need a break from the surroundings of the patient room. Jepson says this room wouldn’t have been possible without support from donors and
photo: ©2017 thinkstock
“You can longitudinally track kids over time to monitor how much radiation they’re getting from medical imaging,” Deans says. “You can also use a large database for research and look at cohorts of kids who might be at much higher risk.” Deans says the tool—which is in its third year of use locally and now is rolling out to other children’s hospitals—runs in the background to help support the prescriber’s clinical decision-making. This technology gives physicians and the patients’ families better information to make health care decisions, Deans says. Patient autonomy has played a role in the development of “respiratory goggles” by Mount Carmel medical physicist Jeananne Zink. She invented them to allow breast and lung cancer patients receiving radiation treatment to see and better control their breathing patterns for more effective treatment. “It could—in the long run—reduce side effects for radiation, so we’ll be sparing more heart and lung tissue than we were before,” Zink says. The next advancement in targeted breast cancer radiation—according to Dr. Shilpa Padia, Mount Carmel’s co-medical director for breast cancer services—is intraoperative radiation therapy (IORT), a single dose of radiation administered during breast cancer surgery. This single dose replaces the fourto-six-week period of radiation treatment patients would normally receive to have their breast tissue treated. Padia has been working with radiation oncologist Dr. Malolan Rajagopalan during these operations, which are only available to older women with an early stage and favorable form of breast cancer. Mount Carmel is currently the only Central Ohio hospital to offer this treatment. “Breast cancer unfortunately affects a lot of women, and it’s already stressful to go through,” Padia says. “So anything we can do to give an effective treatment that allows women to get back to their lives sooner is amazing.”
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partnerships with Ronald McDonald Charities and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. “This is what I love about Columbus,” he adds. “People come together to make sure these critical needs are being met.”
helPing the mediCine go down In today’s world, personalization of everything from phone cases to smart thermostats now extends to medications, thanks to Worthington-based SBH Medical. The specialty compounding and infusion pharmacy provides custom prescriptions to patients nationwide. “We’ve got a lot of opportunities to customize … strength, concentration or the route of administering the medication,” says Robert Hirsh, president of SBH Medical. Hirsch says the process for customized medication starts when a physician recognizes the unique need of a patient who requires something more specific than what’s commercially available. From there the prescribing physician can speak with the compounding pharmacist at SBH Medical about what would be best for the patient. Because everything is done in a sterile environment on-site, SBH has the flexibility to fulfill almost any type of medication request from doctors. Some of the common conditions the company creates medication for are erectile dysfunction, hormone replacement therapy, menopause and reproductive issues, though Hirsch says the spectrum of conditions they can treat goes “from A to Z.” Patients can come to SBH to pick up their meds or have them shipped directly, and they can speak to staff on-site or over the phone if they have any questions. SBH is able to create medication that is free of gluten, preservatives and dyes that might have unwanted effects on patients. An added bonus for children is flavor customization—great for picky kids. “We continue to grow in all aspects of pharmacy,” Hirsch says. “There’s always something new and exciting that keeps us moving in many different directions and help meet the needs of health care.”
THE VERY BEST IN CANCER CARE Sonia Abuzakhm, M.D.
Scott C. Blair, M.D.
Peter Kourlas, M.D.
Shabana Dewani, M.D.
Kavya Krishna, M.D.
Christopher S. George, M.D. Andrew V. Grainger, M.D. Joseph K. Hofmeister, M.D.
Erin Macrae, M.D.
Nse Ntukidem, M.D.
Thomas J. Sweeney, M.D.
Columbus Oncology and
Hematology Associates AN OHIO ONCOLOGY & HEMATOLOGY, LLC PRACTICE 810 Jasonway Ave., Columbus, Ohio 43214
For general cancer information please call OhioHealth’s Cancer Call (614) 566-4321 ALL PHYSICIANS ARE BOARD CERTIFIED
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