History of the Regional Cancer Center at MCCH

“The old cancer center is an old cancer center,” MCCH CEO Jerry Penner said. “As a convenience for our patients, we have infusion together with where you see your doctor, where you get your radiation treatments or your chemotherapy and where you get your blood drawn are all under one roof. Right now, I’ve got one down here in this hallway, one across the street; I’ve got a piece of it in the pharmacy; and don’t forget the lab, which is in another building. … It’s the right thing to do to put it all under a one roof. It’s not going to be opulent; it’s going to be really functional, though. If you have to get cancer treatment, it’s going to be a nice place to go.”

While it may be old, the current cancer center, located on 9th Street, near the Poplar Street intersection, is still remarkable by virtue of its existence. The story behind how it came to be is deeply rooted in western Kentucky’s geographic isolation from the metropolitan areas of the state.

In the 1980s, Stuart Poston, MCCH CEO from 1972-2000, frequently traveled to Louisville and Lexington for meetings and would often carpool with Earl Feezer, CEO of Western Baptist in Paducah. At the time, Baptist had the cancer center.

“I just brought it up one day. I said, ‘Earl, you’ve got a cancer center over there. Of course, Lourdes can’t get one. We’d love to have one. Our percentage of patients from outside Calloway County has increased by about 20%, and we would love to have a cancer center. Would there be any sense in us becoming partners?”

Baptist was about to buy a new cobalt machine, so Poston suggested that MCCH buy their old one to get its cancer center started. Feezer got approval from his board, and with that, MCCH’s cancer program began. A vault to house the machine was built on the south end of the Medical Arts Building, and Baptist provided a radiation oncologist who came down from Paducah at set times to see patients.

The partnership proved to be a successful venture, but Poston had a vision of MCCH having its own cancer center. There was one problem – he knew he could not get a certificate of need.

“The whole purpose behind the certificate of need was to limit the amount of very expensive treatment facilities,” Poston explained. “The first time you got a CT scan, you had to get a certificate of need and wait a year before you got approved; they didn’t want every hospital in the state to have a CT scan back in those days.”

Poston said that, at the time, the Certificate of Need Board held the philosophy that it was reasonable for a patient to drive 75-100 miles to receive treatment. Because MCCH was within 50 miles of the cancer center in Paducah, the chance of getting approved was slim to none.

“After three or four years, I finally went to Earl and said, ‘Earl, we can’t get a certificate of need to have a freestanding center, but if we just buy you out, I think we can get away with doing our own thing,’” Poston recalled. “He finally agreed to that, so we started planning the construction of a free-standing facility. We hired a consultant that did only radiation oncology centers. They laid it out based on our volume and our anticipated volume. So, we started construction.”

The idea was to have medical oncologists on one side and radiation oncologists on the other in hopes of facilitating collaborative care through proximity. Without space available on the main campus, the freestanding facility was built on 9th Street. The digital infrastructure we know today did not exist at the time, so an underground vacuum tube system was installed to send orders, test results and other communications.

“After we got it built, we went from a cobalt machine – a very old cobalt machine – to a linear accelerator, which was the best that they had at the time,” Poston said. “We put in a brand-new machine and hired a radiation oncologist and recruited a medical oncologist. It turned out to be a very successful venture, and we did start drawing patients from Henry County, Marshall County and Graves County and so forth. We were just so fortunate and so lucky to have gotten our (cancer center). We kind of did it all under the radar and got away with it.”