John Hopkins Hospital Expands Cancer Urgent care center

​Several cancer sufferers going through the treatment struggle with extreme pain and fever, nausea, sometimes extreme enough to send them to the emergency room.
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But emergency room’s chaos and related anxiety are "an assault on your well-being," claimed Richard Dean, who took his wife several times while she was fighting against ovarian cancer 6 years ago. He asserted the Johns Hopkins Hospital officials that they required an urgent care center particularly for cancer patients.

Hopkins then inaugurated a cancer urgent care center in the year of 2014 in space adjacent to where chemotherapy treatment is delivered. The Hopkins center is open 12 hours per day during the week and plans to open on Saturdays beginning in the month of March.

Patients generally do not walk in, as they do with other normal urgent care centers, but call a hotline and are told to come to the center if the nurses who answer the phone cannot deal their issues and complications.

About 10 patients per day are now seen by the center— about 3% of those Hopkins treats for cancer disease on an average day — and most go home after some hours.

Sharon Krumm, director of nursing administration at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center said, "We knew sending our patients to the ER (emergency room) were not in their best interests. If they’ve a heart problem or a stroke, yes, it is a good place for them, but that is not what was happening."

The patients of urgent care center do not only get better, more efficient care, Krumm stated. In accordance to a recently released study, it recommends that ignoring hospitalizations is vitally lowering costs for sufferers and decreasing the burden on the health care system.

According to the study researchers from the Kimmel Cancer Center and the Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health, health care costs are more contributed by cancer treatment than any other disease.

In accordance to the study of 18,000 sufferers between the years of 2002 and 2012 released this month in JAMA Oncology, the costs of average out-of-pocket connected with a new cancer diagnosis ranged from $2,116 for Medicaid beneficiaries to $8,115 for those with Medicare and no supplemental insurance.

Hospitalizations accounted for up to 46% of the patient's bill. The research discovered that among a group of patients at John Hopkins Hospital, the average number hospitalized was cut in half after the center launched.
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In accordance to Lindsay Conway, managing director of The Advisory Board Co., which gives research and consulting to hospitals, Hopkins center is believed to be among a half-dozen around the country that have opened for cancer patients, targeting to keep them out of the emergency room and hospital beds.