Baton Rouge General Medical Center’s Pennington Cancer Center has partnered with Siemens to rapidly and efficiently deliver advanced and routine radiation therapy close to home, providing a wider range of options for a larger scope of patients than ever before. The 544-bed, community-owned hospital became the first in the United States to install Siemens ARTISTE™ integrated radiation therapy solution.

Medical Director William Russell, MD, explains that its flexibility was a key factor in their decision. This radiation therapy solution gives them the ability to deliver Image-Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT), conformal radiation therapy, Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT), high-precision radiation therapy, and also gated treatments. To help ensure that that the treatment dose is delivered to the target and not healthy tissue, ARTISTE allows physicians to image the patient just prior to treatment, verify that the patient position is correct, and adapt to any anatomical changes immediately before – or in some cases during – treatment. The system also offers the ability to incorporate the dose used for pretreatment imaging into the treatment plan so that clinicians can accurately monitor the dose delivered to the patient.

As a community-owned hospital, Baton Rouge General has a duty to be a good financial steward. The addition of ARTISTE helps them accomplish this goal by providing measurable financial benefits. Zack Smith, RT, MBA, Director of Radiation Oncology, says that its rapid throughput – even complex treatments such as IMRT can be accomplished in ten minutes – allows them to treat more patients in a day. Having a single solution that can accomplish multiple tasks also reduces staff training costs as well as engineering, maintenance, and vault costs.