My name is Paul Read and I'm a professor in Radiation Oncology and I'm fortunate to serve
as the Medical Director and the Vice Chair of our department here in the Emily Couric
Cancer Center. Cancer affects the family, it affects the community even. My father had died of cancer as well
I remember sitting in waiting rooms, and you know, you want to do other things, you want to be home, you want to be with your family,
and you want to get pain relief quickly. We need to refocus our effort,
not to treat the cancer but to treat the patient and to support the patient. Back in 2003, we
were awarded a grant to build a program where we could use the tomotherapy system to
deliver very high doses of radiation to patients to very small volumes and about
three to four years later we started thinking, maybe we can do this in a way
that patients could come and have this done in a single day. And so our goal is to
get patients treated quickly. In this program, patients have pain relief
really within the first week where as in the prior workflow, you weren't even part way through your
treatment yet. Every minute counts when you only
have a few months left to live. We've been very fortunate at the University of Virginia
that the Administration, the Medical Center, and the Medical School have been very supportive of us pioneering
treatments that aren't focused on revenue, but on the patient's quality of life and outcome and convenience.
There's something called the standard of care. Well the standard of care's not good enough. We want to be on
that cutting edge. We have to do better, we always have to try to improve it. Thomas Jefferson would say that.