by
John R. Fischer, Senior Reporter | March 12, 2018
From the March 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Experts agree that understanding of the role that proton therapy can play in pediatrics is the main factor that determines its success and growth.
“There are only a handful of us who have used proton therapy for a length of time more than four or five years,” says Gordon. “That does make it a lot more difficult. For me personally, as more centers come up, I hope that we see more centers for pediatrics to offer training programs for new physicians to come out and learn the techniques to use this tool.”
What is being done and what is expected
Although access to proton therapy is growing for pediatric patients, Dr. Rahul R. Parikh, assistant professor, medical director of the Laurie Proton Therapy Center at Robert Wood Johnson, has examined utilization patterns and illustrated how much work remains to be done.
In two separate studies, he and his colleagues looked at outcomes from a large national observational database, the National Cancer Database, to highlight a lack of access to proton therapy as well as discrepancies in the profile of which patients receive it. One study looked at pediatric medulloblastoma, a brain tumor that starts near the base of the skull, and another study looked at all central nervous system tumors -- both ideal indications for the use of protons, particularly in pediatric patients.
They discovered that while patients from families with more favorable socioeconomic backgrounds were more likely to receive the treatment, access in general is still extremely limited. In the pediatric central nervous system study, the researchers put forth their own guess as to what accounts for the underutilization.
"There are currently too few proton therapy centers, making travel to a center impossible for most families. Due to the prohibitive cost of proton therapy, the current delivery model consists of large, multi-room centers and consolidated care in metropolitan tertiary care centers," they wrote.
One way those challenges are being met is through the emergence of single-room or two- room proton centers. Parikh and his colleagues in New Brunswick, N.J., utilize a Mevion proton therapy system, which is geared toward providing smaller, single-room proton gantries at a much lower cost than the four- or five-room centers.
