NORTH AUGUSTA — May 12 marked the official opening of Augusta Oncology Multispecialty Clinic in North Augusta, the $30 million project capturing every facet of cancer treatment in one facility, a first for the Central Savannah River Area.
Augusta Oncology sees around 3,000 patients a day across its five area treatment centers, and health officials are estimating that North Augusta alone will serve close to 400 patients a day.
“It has been quite a venture to get here,” AO Multispecialty Chief Operating Officer Robert Hendricks said.
Though only a year between Augusta Oncology announcing its expansion into North Augusta and the start of treatments here in mid-February, the front-end work took place in Columbia, at the General Assembly, where Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette this week said the state’s lawmakers had been “really listening to the medical world saying ‘we need more outlets for treating our patients.’”
South Carolina’s repeal of the Certificate of Need — the bureaucratic red tape that had until mid-2023 bound medical providers to stringent requirements before building new hospitals or larger-scale clinics. Even expansions in medical equipment and telemedicine were subject to licensing.
“Certificate of Need was stifling so many clinics like this that could open up and do great things for every sector of our state,” Evette said.
“Our goal has always been to remove barriers to care and make the cancer journey easier for our patients and their families,” Traci Duffie, CEO of AO Multispecialty, said.
Comprehensive care
The facility, located at 150 Bluff Ave., is intended to maximize not only treatment capacity but treatment quality, John Kowal said.
Kowal, president of Siemens Healthineers for the Americas, said the clinic’s layered convenience — a 30,000-square-foot medical oncology suite above a 15,000 square-feet of radiation center — is paramount in making sure no one has to travel “miles and miles, hours and hours” to get full treatment.
Part of that treatment might come from one of two linear accelerators, ensconced in a pair of concrete vaults and picked out as top-of-the line technology, a qualifier affirmed by a radiation therapist of 26 years.
“This is state of the art. You won’t get this anywhere in this area, and especially not this combination,” Linda Jainniney said, gesturing to one of the “Linacs.”
Augusta Oncology is able to re-plan patient treatments in real time, while the patient is on the treatment table, she said. No delay, no need to “re-simulate,” she said, if the tumor shrinks more rapidly than expected or if the patient loses weight unexpectedly.
“The whole goal here is to have the highest quality imaging to make sure that you very clearly can see the target where it is today and to be able to carve around it, make sure that we end up ablating that tumor and minimizing the impact, in a non-invasive environment,” Siemens’ Kowal summarized.
Radiation treatments might go on every day for six weeks. That can translate into a patient having to make some hard decisions during an already stressful time — the tugs between personal needs and health needs, Jainniney said.
But in North Augusta, “They can get the care that they need while they're right here with their family and not have to make that choice,” she said. “Traveling is a huge thing, especially when prognoses can be very different, so you have to weigh — you know, do I want to spend that time away from my family? They don’t have to make that choice.”
Nancy Kitchens attested to the level of care she received from Augusta Oncology after being diagnosed with breast cancer during the buildout of the North Augusta facility.
Now in radiation, the treatment offered by those Linacs has been pain-free, she said, a little awed still — she admitted that she hadn’t quite believed the doctors when they said it would be.
“This place has your back in the biggest way; they want to save your life,” she said.
From an underutilized building to one of life-saving work, North Augusta Mayor Briton Williams said the massive transformation of the former Medac building, half-vacant for years and seeing only the 50 or so employees each day, into Augusta Oncology and its revolving doors of patients and doctors was needed density for economic activity and a needed link between the city’s downtown and its once-again developing Riverside Village.
Not on the list for why Augusta Oncology came here, Williams laughed, but still, “that’s a serendipity for us.”
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