Lynette Bisconti: Her words to me were, “Can you get your medical records and can you be here tomorrow?”
Pattie Berens: I am here to answer your questions, try and help you understand what you need to bring with you and you don’t have to think about anything. You are totally taken care of, from your air travel to getting your medical records, to making sure you have accommodations at the facility, to your appointment schedule.
Harry Buchman: Well we have a whole team of specialists that just work with insurance companies that will call, check on benefits and see if we are in the network. If we are out of the network what their level of coverage is at our facility. We have shuttle services and limousine services to pick them up the airport and drive them right to the hospital or to the guest rooms where they will be staying.
So every step along the way we wanted to let the patient relax and just focus on themselves getting better and let us worry about getting them here, working with their insurance, helping with the medical records, getting their travel arranged, booking the rooms for them – we want to take care of all that.
Lynette Bisconti: And I thought, well that sounds really easy. I mean nobody makes it that easy for you. So I did. I got my medical records which I had been carrying with me everywhere I went and my husband and I got in the car and for us, we were fortunate, we drove 75 miles to Cancer Treatment Centers of America.
Dr. Edgar Staren: What we are trying to do is to put Cancer Treatment Centers of America facilities close enough to the various parts of the country where patients don’t have to travel so far. It facilitates the care if they can be closer to the loved ones. I was amazed to see the way patients were cared for immediately upon their arrival from wherever they were coming. Patients are picked up in the airport or train station and they are brought to Cancer Treatment Centers of America.
But I now recognize how important that is. Cancer diagnosis and having the disease process ends up being so stressful and without question, that stress and the disease itself, decreases your ability to fight it off. You decrease your immune system when you end up having higher stresses.
We do everything we can to try to decrease that stress. We want to facilitate a patient being scheduled. We want to make sure that whatever travel arrangements need to be made that we can assist with those. We want them to know that when they arrive in this foreign town that we are going to embrace them and take them under our wings, take them to our facility so that they can be attended to and be provided the kind of care that we know they need.