Dr. Doug Flora, who is spearheading St.Elizabeth Healthcare’s plan to build the largest comprehensive cancer center in Greater Cincinnati, was sidetracked a few months ago after a CAT scan revealed something suspicious. Flora, a medical oncologist, was diagnosed with kidney cancer.
“Cancer spares no one,” said Flora, 46,president of the St. E medical staff. “The incidence of cancer is going up exponentially,and the prevalence is also going up. The future greatest killer of patients is going to be cancer.”
Baby boomers are aging. Many smoked cigarettes or have unhealthy diets. But because of advances in cardiovascular medicine, many are now surviving their heart attacks at 58 or their strokes at 62 – only to get colon cancer at 67.
It’s unclear why Flora got the disease. About 20 percent of cancers are linked to genetics. St. Elizabeth hopes to take the lead in battling the increase in cancer locally, and genetic testing will play a key role. The hospital system intends to spend more than $100 million to build and equip a massive cancer center, which will lead to the creation of hundreds of medical jobs. The goal is to be the No. 1 cancer care provider in the region.
“We’re trying to develop something that’s comprehensive and one of a kind,” St.Elizabeth CEO Garren Colvin said. “It’s not necessarily going to compete with the programs (of other hospital systems). We’re not fighting over patients because,unfortunately, there are far too many cancer patients in our community.”
However, Flora expects the new building – and the sort of expertise that St.Elizabeth plans to staff it with – will draw patients from both sides of the Ohio River.
His own career has been spent mostly treating advanced cancers, Flora said.Doctors can extend and improve the lives of patients with Stage 4 cancer, but often can’t cure them.
“Part of my personal push for this cancer center is to try to force a stage migration where with better detection – better screening and population health – we as a system can find more cancers at an earlier, more curable stage,” Flora said.
He underwent surgery at St. E in October to cut out the cancer in his kidney. After a few weeks of working from his Anderson Township home while recuperating, Flora is back to seeing patients.
“I feel good,” Flora said with a smile. “I feel charged up. We’ve set aside a significant proportion of my time to help make sure the programs and the cancer center get built. Obviously, it’s a passion project for me – even before my cancer.”
$130 million price tag
Colvin estimated that building the cancer center, which could feature a six-story tower and encompass more than 186,000 square feet, will cost $130 million over three years. Work is about to get underway, and construction is to be completed by 2020. The building will be able to accommodate 650 workers, including hundreds of new positions.
With regard to the design, Flora said the instruction he received from St. E’s CEO was simple: Build a cancer center that you would want to take your wife or mother to if they needed care.
“There will be a grand atrium with all the softer patient touches that make you understand we want to welcome you into our home,” Flora said. “There will be a bistro with coffee. There will be an area set aside for multiple uses like yoga,physical therapy, art therapy, music therapy.”
The clinical floors will be higher up – perhaps with picture windows so people receiving chemotherapy can look out over the golf course at Summit Hills Country Club.
“The center we’re about to build is designed from the ground up with the patient experience as our driving motivator,” Flora said. “We want to offer our patients access to the latest clinical trials but also that softer touch that lets them know they are part of our family.”
In addition, “I think we build this center to attract magnet physicians who specialize in multidisciplinary care and have a commitment to research and cutting-edge therapeutics,” Flora said.
“This is like building the University of Kentucky’s locker room,” Flora added. “When blue-chip basketball players tour the facilities and you show them Rupp Arena, they want to be part of that. This facility is going to be state of the art – every possible touch to enhance the patient experience. And any physician would want to work in that kind of building.”
Design being finalized
Turner Construction is the project’s general contractor. Champlin Architecture is local designer, and Minneapolis-based HGA Architects is lead designer. Array Architects did the conceptual drawings that St. E shared with the Business Courier,but new renderings will be created by HGA as the design is finalized.
Some buildings will be demolished to clear 4 acres for the tower’s footprint at St.Elizabeth’s 136-acre campus in Edgewood, and that should start by March. Kathy Jennings, a nurse who is St. E’s vice president of oncology services, is senior administrator on the build.
The cancer center is the largest and most expensive project undertaken by St.Elizabeth, Colvin said. He hopes to raise up to $35 million in a capital campaign,which would include donations from businesses. The rest will come from operations of St. Elizabeth, which has a capital budget of $90 million a year and a total annual budget of $1 billion.
“You’re not allowed to have any favorite projects when you’re the CEO, but I can tell you that I’ve never been more passionate about the opportunity to save lives in our community,” Colvin said.
Kentucky has the nation’s highest rate of new cancer cases: nearly 514 per 100,000 people. Kenton County has the third-highest rate of annual cancer diagnoses of Kentucky’s 120 counties. (Boone and Campbell counties are fifth and eighth,respectively.)
Greater Cincinnati will have more than 3,400 newly diagnosed cancer cases by 2021. Breast cancer will account for 17 percent of those cases, prostate cancer 15 percent and lung cancer 13 percent.
With a workforce of 8,400, including about 365 doctors, St. E is the largest employer in Northern Kentucky and the dominant medical provider. The new center could solidify that.
St. E ramped up cancer care in 2016 with the acquisition of the Northern Kentucky practice of Linwood-based Oncology Hematology Care Inc., which included 10 doctors who specialize in medical or radiation oncology. The OHC doctors who became St. Elizabeth employees included Flora and his brother, Dr. Dan Flora, who directs oncology research.
Dan Flora expects St. Elizabeth to build its cancer center around a clinical research program that will include trials of the latest drugs, which might not be available at other hospitals for years.
“By leveraging new information from genetic testing, we hope that patients will have many more opportunities to receive personalized treatment as part of a clinical trial,” Dan Flora said.
St. E already has two dedicated oncology geneticists, and there’s going to be a push toward earlier screening of genetic risk factors and family histories of patients. A physician trained in hereditary breast and brain cancers will join St. E in February and help direct that venture.
St. Elizabeth now employs 20 doctors who specialize in cancer. Doug Flora, interim medical director of the cancer center, is recruiting other high-caliber physicians.
“Over the next three years we will probably add three to five medical oncologists,perhaps several surgeons and many more ancillary support people,” Doug Flora said. “This year I think we’ve personally asked for 13 more jobs just specific to program building. Each one of those leaders of those programs will have a staff of people who are brought in.”
The fight the Flora brothers wage against cancer is personal. Their mother,Christine, died of breast cancer in her early 40s, when Doug was 21 and Dan was 15.
“We’re both empathetic and caring doctors because we were on the other side of it,” Doug Flora said.
His own diagnosis of cancer, Flora said, “sort of galvanized that it’s even more important for me to get out and help fundraising efforts and program-building efforts and hire these magnet physicians that people like me want to go to.”