St. Charles Health System announces cancer center expansion in Redmond

BEND, Ore. – More than 40% of patients treated at the St. Charles Cancer Center in Bend travel from Redmond, Madras, Prineville and other rural communities for their care. If they need radiation as part of their treatment, this can mean traveling more than 50 miles for services multiple days in a row for weeks at a time.

“We know that many of our patients travel farther than patients at other cancer centers in the country for their care,” said Dr. Linyee Chang, medical director of the St. Charles Cancer Center. “Some patients opt out of treatment because of the travel and that’s not OK.”

To better meet the needs of these patients, St. Charles Health System is excited to announce plans to expand cancer services in Redmond.   

Using $90 million secured through bonds in the fall of 2020 that are restricted and must be used for new construction, St. Charles will build a new cancer center on the St. Charles Redmond campus at the corner of Canal Boulevard and Kingwood Avenue.

“The announcement of a world-class cancer center to be constructed here at the St. Charles hospital in Redmond is a milestone event in the history of our community,” said Redmond Mayor Ed Fitch. “I want to express our deep appreciation to the St. Charles Board of Directors for its commitment to the health care needs of Redmond as well as the other communities this center will serve. The city and the community will do all we can to help facilitate this project and the future expansion of health care services here in Redmond.” 

The facility will include a linear accelerator to provide radiation oncology treatments, along with space for chemotherapy treatments, nutrition, massage, acupuncture and other support services. It will also include space for additional outpatient services and medical office building needs.

“As the health care industry continues to face significant challenges, we are looking to maximize the efficiency of the services we provide to ensure we continue meeting the most critical needs of our Central Oregon communities,” said Dr. Steve Gordon, interim president and CEO of St. Charles. “We are making a significant investment in ambulatory services on the Redmond campus that will ultimately provide better access to care for patients.”

Building design is underway and ground was broken on the project in the summer of 2024. Currently, the facility is slated to open in 2026.

View preliminary site plan

About St. Charles Health System

St. Charles Health System, Inc., headquartered in Bend, Ore., owns and operates St. Charles Bend, Madras, Prineville and Redmond. It also owns family care clinics in Bend, Madras, Prineville, Redmond, La Pine and Sisters. St. Charles is a private, not-for-profit Oregon corporation and is the largest employer in Central Oregon with more than 4,500 caregivers. In addition, there are more than 350 active medical staff members and nearly 200 visiting medical staff members who partner with the health system to provide a wide range of care and service to our communities.

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Residency Programs at St. Charles

Residency Program in Rural Oregon

The Three Sisters Rural Track Program is the first Graduate Medical Education Program and Rural Track Program in Central Oregon. As a 1-2 program, this residency will recruit up to six residents per class.

Residents will spend their first year in Portland, followed by two years in Central Oregon at our Madras hospital and Family Care Clinic. In partnership with Oregon Health & Science University, this program brings together educational teams within various clinical models to help meet the needs of rural parts of Oregon.

Caring for our rural communities

Why Central Oregon?

In Central Oregon, mountains, rivers, forests and high lakes abound, offering amazing recreational opportunities for adventurous souls. Plus countless craft beer pubs, cozy local restaurants and fun events every weekend only add to the charm of this place we call home.

Visit Central Oregon

Program Contacts

Dr. Jinnell Lewis, Program Director (St. Charles Health System)
Jessica Latham, Program Coordinator (OHSU)
[email protected]

Visit OHSU's Three Sisters Rural Track Program page to learn more.

Grand Rounds - Jan. 20, 2023
"Fatty Liver: The Emerging Healthcare Giant"

Speaker: Paul Martin, MD, FRCP, FRCPI. Division of Digestive Health and Liver Diseases, University of Miami.

Objectives

1. Review epidemiology, risk factors and differentiating features of simple steatosis and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis.
2. Understand pathogenesis and potential targets for the treatment of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis.
3. Identify both hepatic and non-hepatic complications of fatty liver.

Accreditation: St. Charles Health System is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians. St. Charles Health System designates this live activity for a maximum of 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)^TM.

The period to claim credit for this activity expires one year after its original publication. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Claim Credit

Target Audience: Physicians, Nurses, Pharmacists, Allied Health Professionals

Accessibility/Program Questions: St. Charles Health System encourages persons with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you anticipate needing any type of accommodation or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact Continuing Medical Education at [email protected].

Oher CME or Clerkship questions: also contact Continuing Medical Education at [email protected].

* NOTE: Attached is a photo of the honorees. Identification, from left to right: Kirsten Chavez, Hillary Dunbar, Labree Tolman, Samantha Martin.

St. Charles nurses honored with DAISY Award for outstanding, compassionate care

The following St. Charles Health System nurses have been honored with The DAISY Award for Extraordinary Nurses®, recognizing the outstanding, compassionate nursing care they provide patients and families every day:

• Bend: Kirsten Chavez, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
• Madras: Labree Tolman, Emergency Department
• Prineville: Samantha Martin, Medical Services
• Redmond: Hillary Dunbar, Medical Services

Nominated by patients, families and colleagues, the award recipients were chosen by a committee at St. Charles.

The nurses—who represent all four St. Charles hospitals in Bend, Redmond, Madras and Prineville—were recognized with a ceremony on their respective units and presented with a certificate, a pin and a "healer's touch" sculpture by their hospital’s chief nursing officer. The DAISY honorees will also receive ongoing benefits, such as special rates for tuition and ANCC certification.

The DAISY Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that was established in memory of J. Patrick Barnes by members of his family. Patrick died at the age of 33 in late 1999 from complications of Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP), a little known but not uncommon auto-immune disease. (DAISY is an acronym for Diseases Attacking the Immune System.) The care Patrick and his family received from nurses while he was ill inspired this unique means of thanking nurses for making a profound difference in the lives of their patients and patient families.

"When Patrick was critically ill, our family experienced first-hand the remarkable skill and care nurses provide patients every day and night,” said Bonnie Barnes, FAAN, president and co-founder of The DAISY Foundation. “Yet these unsung heroes are seldom recognized for the super-human, extraordinary, compassionate work they do. The kind of work the nurses at St. Charles are called on to do every day epitomizes the purpose of The DAISY Award.”

This is one initiative of The DAISY Foundation to express gratitude to the nursing profession. Additionally, DAISY offers J. Patrick Barnes Grants for Nursing Research and Evidence-Based Practice Projects, The DAISY Faculty Award to honor inspiring faculty members in schools and colleges of nursing and The DAISY in Training Award for nursing students. More information is available at http://DAISYfoundation.org.

About St. Charles Health System

St. Charles Health System, Inc., headquartered in Bend, Ore., owns and operates St. Charles Bend, Madras, Prineville and Redmond. It also owns family care clinics in Bend, La Pine, Madras, Prineville, Redmond and Sisters. St. Charles is a private, not-for-profit Oregon corporation and is the largest employer in Central Oregon with more than 4,200 caregivers. In addition, there are more than 350 active medical staff members and nearly 200 visiting medical staff members who partner with the health system to provide a wide range of care and service to our communities.

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PubMed

Many caregivers use PubMed to identify relevant medical literature. It's a free resource offered by the National Library of Medicine that includes more than 35 million references (January 2023) and allows searching in three different databases: 

• Medline. Indexes journal articles. Most of them are only available under subscription, although an increasing number of papers are free under an open-access license. St. Charles caregivers can also directly access the full text of those resources the library subscribes to; for other sources, please place a request, and we'll be happy to help. 
• PubMed Central (PMC). All the articles indexed on PMC are available for free (see the list of included journals). 
• Bookshelf. Indexes and gives access to books and book chapters. Some of the available content is in the public domain, but some are subject to copyright. 

MeSH

PubMed allows keyword (free text) searching, in the form of a simple search or in a more advanced way using specific fields, operators, and filters. But it also includes a powerful controlled vocabulary tool called Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) that will help any researcher to take their literature research a step forward:

The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus is a controlled and hierarchically-organized vocabulary produced by the National Library of Medicine. It is used for indexing, cataloging, and searching of biomedical and health-related information. MeSH includes the subject headings appearing in MEDLINE/PubMed, the NLM Catalog, and other NLM databases.

If you want to use MeSH, access the search page and type a topic you are interested in. For example, child obesity. This is not a MeSH term, but the resource is able to take us to the accepted term: pediatric obesity. That page describes the term and gives us some other helpful information. Specially: 

• Subheadings or scope terms: if selected, they allow us to look into a specific subset of the term we are exploring. In this case, for example, we could only be interested in literature about genetic factors linked to pediatric obesity. 
• Entry terms or cross-references: these are not accepted as subject headings but that the system recognizes them as synonyms or very close in significate.
• Hierarchy: shows where our concept lies within a list of broader and more specific terms. In this case, pediatric obesity does not have any more specific heading that connects to it, but it is connected broadly to two different disease branches where the main categories are Nutritional and metabolic diseases and Pathological conditions: signs and symptoms. We can navigate those links if we want to refocus our approach to be more broad or more specific. 

Once we have a clear idea of what we want to include in the search, we can select it and press the "Add to search builder" button on the right part of the screen. This will add our concepts to the search field. In this case, if we look for genetic factors in pediatric obesity, the result would be this: "Pediatric Obesity/genetics"[Mesh].

If we want to include more subject headings, we can repeat the process and add the new terms to the search builder using the boolean operators that better suit our needs. After that, we will click "Search PubMed," and the system will take us there, where we will have a results page that we can then improve by applying filters.

Let's say we want to retrieve a recent systematic review in our example. We would select the relevant options in the left sidebar: "Systematic Review" and "5 years". Here is the result, and here a document that seems very relevant to us: 

• Campbell ET, Franks AT, Joseph PV. Adolescent obesity in the past decade: A systematic review of genetics and determinants of food choice. J Am Assoc Nurse Pract. 2019;31(6):344-351. doi:10.1097/JXX.0000000000000154

It turns out that the Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners is included in PMC, so lucky us... we can get the full text for free!

If you need helps using PubMed or MeSH, please contact the Medical Library.

Grand Rounds - Jan. 6, 2023
"Epidemiology Update: RSV, COVID‐19, Monkey pox, Polio"

Speaker: Shira C. Shafir, PhD, MPH. Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

Objectives

1. Describe current epidemiologic characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic, including transmissibility and severity of illness.
2. Detail effectiveness of available vaccines in protecting against the Omicron variant.
3. Describe the epidemiologic characteristics of the Monkeypox outbreak.
4. Explain the current polio situation in New York.

Accreditation: St. Charles Health System is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians. St. Charles Health System designates this live activity for a maximum of 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)^TM.

The period to claim credit for this activity expires one year after its original publication. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Claim Credit

Target Audience: Physicians, Nurses, Pharmacists, Allied Health Professionals

Accessibility/Program Questions: St. Charles Health System encourages persons with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you anticipate needing any type of accommodation or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact Continuing Medical Education at [email protected].

Oher CME or Clerkship questions: also contact Continuing Medical Education at [email protected].

The first request of 2023 came to the Medical Library on Jan. 1 at 9:43 am. It was an ask for the article Associations between several site of cancer and 10 types of exhaust and combustion products, whose parents are Siemiatycki et al. Congratulations!

The paper was born 11 pages long and, surprisingly, weighed 35 years. Here is a picture of the newborn abstract:

Note: thank you to Theresa Kramer for the idea!

The end of the year is a good time to look back, celebrate our successes, recognize the challenges ahead and reflect on the journey of the past 12 months.

After COVID-19 dominated our activities at St. Charles in 2020 and 2021, 2022 was about accepting the virus as a part of normal life, incorporating it into the day-to-day care we provide and continuing to innovate and improve in areas across the health system.

When I think about what St. Charles has accomplished in 2022, I am enormously proud of our caregivers and physicians, our leadership and our organization as a whole. It takes incredible teamwork, laser focus and dedication to the communities we serve to push a regional health system forward in the midst of a pandemic and unprecedented financial challenges, and our team has done exactly that.

Here are just a few of the things we’ve done that come to mind:

• Early this year, we rolled out outpatient treatments for people with COVID-19, and our Urgent Care clinics are now federally designated Test to Treat sites where people at high risk of severe COVID-19 illness can get fast and easy access to therapeutics.
• We opened a new Infectious Disease clinic, which offers travel medicine consults to help keep Central Oregonians safe and healthy when they leave the country.
• We’ve expanded our Center for Women’s Health, adding three new physicians and improving access to reproductive health care for all women.
• We have established training programs that provide a path to a career in patient care for our caregivers in non-medical positions as well as people outside the organization looking to get into health care. These programs are helping us address our significant staffing shortages.
• We hired our first manager of caregiver inclusion and experience, who is dedicated to making sure St. Charles is a place where people feel like they belong. And for the second time in three years, we received national recognition for our work to welcome the LGBTQ+ community.
• Our Three Sisters Rural Track graduate medical education program in Madras – a partnership with OHSU – continues to develop largely behind the scenes, with an aim to bring doctors to Jefferson County in 2025.
• We’ve brought back in-person events, such as the Heaven Can Wait 5K walk/run in Redmond and the annual Hospice Auction in Prineville, as well as important community efforts such as Stop the Bleed training and our Living Beyond Breast Cancer series.
• We’ve implemented a system-wide focus on our financial recovery efforts, which has helped our bottom line in recent months. At the same time, we are significantly restructuring how we work into service lines to improve patient care, patient outcomes and patient satisfaction, and we have launched what we’re calling our One St. Charles strategy to bring our organization closer together and guide us into the future.

This is, of course, just some of the good work happening across the health system – work that will continue in 2023 and beyond.

Thank you for your support of St. Charles.

Sincerely,
Steve

St. Charles staff and patients have seen an uptick in scams related to medical equipment.

These scams usually take the form of an unsolicited call (or other communication) from someone claiming to be from St. Charles, Medicare, an insurance company or a durable medical equipment company, offering you a free or low-cost medical device as an insurance “benefit.” These calls may even display what appears to be a legitimate phone number on caller ID.

These callers are trying to get valuable information from you, such as your Social Security Number or your insurance information. Do not give them your personal information. Instead, hang up and call your provider’s office to find out if they need information from you.

Furthermore, don’t order medical equipment over the phone unless you are advised to do so by your provider, and refuse delivery of medical equipment unless it was ordered by your doctor.

If a caller urges you to order a piece of equipment now for future use, that is a red flag. Charging insurance for equipment before your doctor certifies it as medically necessary is illegal.

Frequently review your health plan’s Explanation of Benefits or Medicare Summary Notice to ensure all charges are appropriate. If you see charges you don’t recognize, call Medicare at 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227) or your insurance company immediately.

If you believe you have been a victim of any kind of phone scam, please consider reporting it to the organizations below.

• The Federal Trade Commission is the primary government agency that collects scam complaints:
  • Online: https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/
  • By phone: 1-877-382-4357
• To report suspected Medicare fraud: 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227).
• Report caller ID spoofing to the Federal Communications Commission:
  • Online: https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us
  • By phone: 1-888-225-5322
• If you have been a victim of identity theft, visit https://identitytheft.gov/ for information on how to report.