- Welcome everyone to the Becker's
Healthcare podcast series.
I'm Mariah Mohammed, writer
and moderator with Becker's Healthcare,
and I'm absolutely thrilled to have with me today Dr.
Freya Schnebel, director
of Breast Cancer at NYU Lone Medical Center.
Doctor, it's very nice to have you on the podcast today.
To get us started, would you mind please introducing
yourself and telling us a bit about your background?
- Thank you so much for having me.
And I, I am the director
of breast surgery here at NYU Langone
Health in, uh, New York.
So in terms of background, I am, um, an a OA alum
of the NYU School of Medicine,
and I completed my surgical training here at NYU.
Um, after doing a research fellowship, I spent the
more than 15 years at the Columbia University Medical
Center, and at the end of that time, I was the chief
of the section of breast surgery
before coming back here to NYU
to assume a leadership role in breast surgery.
Since 2007, my clinical
and research interests include both breast cancer
and women at high risk for the disease.
- Wonderful. Thank you so much for giving us
that background about what you do.
Um, and to jump right into the first question,
the first thing I wanted to ask you is
what are your top priorities right now?
- So I, I think it's a really good question
because obviously healthcare is so, uh,
rapidly evolving right now, and breast cancer, um,
and high risk patients per se,
are a very rapidly evolving area of healthcare.
So I, I think our top priorities right now are spending time
concentrating on how to increase the efficiency of the way
that we deliver care in diagnostic workup
and management and so on.
Um, and of course treatment while maintaining high
patient satisfaction.
So we wanna be as efficient as we can for our processes,
but we wanna make sure that our patients feel like we are
paying good attention to them
and they are being well cared for at the same time.
And I think that is really our top priority.
In addition, like a lot of healthcare systems
around the country, our system is growing all the time.
We're adding new locations, we're adding new practices,
we're adding new facilities.
And so, uh, an enormous challenge for us right now is how
to, um, create standard processes across
this large and enlarging network to make sure
that patients get the same high standard of care
wherever they are in our, uh, enterprise.
- Got it. Got it. Yeah, thank you so much
for giving us that explanation.
And how are your organ organization evolve over the next two
to three years, would you say?
- So I think just as a segue to the last comment
that I made, we really are working on this idea
of standardization across the network.
Um, everyone has to be on the same electronic medical record
to allow for, uh, information sharing in a seamless way.
We wanna make sure that patients have equal access across
all of our sites to the same, um, interventions,
the same imaging, the the same biopsy interventions,
the same level of care,
including things like clinical trials
across the entire enterprise.
And that's a big job.
That's not, uh, it doesn't sound easy
and it's certainly not even as easy as it sounds.
So anticipating even further growth across this enterprise
within the next several years, we have to make sure that
as we grow, we create consistency, good access to care.
Everybody can get
what they need when they need it at an appropriate site
for them to seek and get their care.
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely, definitely sounds very essential
and, you know, impactful
to what's happening right now in society.
Doctor, the last thing I wanted to ask you
before I let you go is, what is one change you
or your team has made that yielded great results?
- So I, I love that question
because we make a lot of changes
and changes so often incrementally done, um,
where you see small improvements that, um,
it's a great thing to think about what we did
that created really big wins.
So one improvement
that we've made over the last several years has to do
with the conduct of, uh,
breast surgery when we're operating on patients
who have problems within their breasts
that are not palpable, that are not clinically evident,
that we cannot find, um, by palpating the breast, and that
therefore require a process called localization prior
to their surgery to make sure
that the surgeon can target the correct area in the breast.
Uh, the old method for localization
involved a pretty involved process that patients had to go
through on the day of their surgery,
and that wasn't optimal from an
efficient process perspective.
It required patients to go
to multiple locations within the institution prior
to their surgery and all of this
at a time when they're fasting in advance of their surgery.
So a number of years ago, we were very early adopters
of a technique of wire free localization
where we decoupled this localization process from the day
of surgery so that patients could have a,
a localization process done
with inserting what's called a reflector into the area
that needed to be operated on,
on a different day when they weren't fasting,
when they could do it at their own convenience.
And this uncomplicated the day of surgery for the patient,
it made our overall process more efficient
by reducing delays in the operating room,
which are certainly costly and not patient friendly.
Um, and it allowed us to make our entire process easier
and simpler for people on the day of their surgeries.
That was a big win.
Another, uh, process improvement that we made that I think,
um, is gonna be expanded,
but has certainly been another big win, is to
simplify the process of genetic testing, especially
for patients with new breast cancer diagnoses,
where the results of testing can be really critical in
decision making for their treatment.
So we've gone to, uh, a simplified point
of care testing process, which, um, has allowed us
to really jumpstart getting samples drawn as submitted
for testing, which the turnaround can take up to 10 days.
So we, uh, simplified that process,
put it back into the surgeon's offices,
and, uh, allowed our patients to then get that information,
um, already pending
and cooking so that by the time we're ready
to confirm our surgical decision making,
the results are available.
Um, that's been really very doctor friendly
and very patient friendly,
and it's something that I,
I think we're gonna see expanded
throughout our entire network.
- Yeah, for sure. Thank you so, so much
for giving us tho those great insights
and for those final thoughts, doctor,
it's definitely been an amazing and informative discussion.
So again, I wanna thank you so much
for coming on Becker's Healthcare.
We really do appreciate it
and I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
- Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here
and uh, I'd love to connect with you again soon
as well. Have a great day.
- Thank you.