CRITICAL CARE

Dr. Cecilia Ong and Dr. Mariam Nawas are experienced oncologists on staff at UChicago Medicine AdventHealth in Hinsdale. Bringing their expertise to Hinsdale is part of UChicago Medicine’s mission to bring academic medicine to more communities throughout the Chicago area. Drs. Ong and Nawas benefit from the longstanding relationship AdventHealth has established with the community, while the connection to UChicago Medicine provides patients with direct access to one of the top medical research universities in the country.

UChicago Medicine has provided high-quality health care to patients in the Chicago region for decades. However, until UChicago Medicine’s joint venture with AdventHealth, patients living in the Western Suburbs had to drive to either the University of Chicago campus on the South Side of Chicago or one of its facilities or clinics in the city or Orland Park to get advanced, specialized care.

“Historically, the University of Chicago Medicine has provided great care to patients, especially for patients on the South Side,” Dr. Ong, a surgical oncologist, says. “We’ve also established UChicago Medicine as an academic leader in oncologic care through clinical trials that push the boundaries of the delivery of clinical care directly to patients with complex disease.”

The research component of UChicago Medicine is foundational to the world-class care the academic health system provides. It may be developing new drugs that can be the next big difference for a cancer patient’s journey. But Dr. Ong recognizes there are certain limitations when care is concentrated to certain physical spaces.

“Our aim is to provide high quality care to patients regardless of what socio-economic walk of life or geographic area they come from,” Dr. Ong says. “The AdventHealth system has already been very well established within the Western Suburbs as a leader in clinical care and a center that is very highly regarded amongst our patients, and we’re very lucky to be able to partner with this institution that has a community presence and community trust.” She aims to bring her expertise in the surgical management of a wide variety of abdominal and soft tissue malignancies to this community.

In addition to providing research-based treatments, Dr. Nawas says another, related advantage of the partnership is that UChicago Medicine doctors can provide very specialized care in medical fields such as oncology.

“AdventHealth already has a great group of oncologists, but what we can offer is deeper expertise in specific areas,” Dr. Nawas says. “What I am bringing to Hinsdale is an expertise in myeloid diseases, which are a type of blood cancers or hematologic malignancies.”

The hope, she says, is that kind of specialization can be built on and expanded.

“Basically, it’s a kind of augmented care for patients that are already being treated in Hinsdale, bringing in additional consultation or a second opinion,” she says. “It’s a really high level of expertise that we can offer patients that they would normally have to travel into the city or even sometimes out of state to get.”

And it’s not just patients who can benefit from the expertise of UChicago Medicine’s doctors. It’s other oncologists and doctors as well.

“We are constantly gaining a better understanding of how to apply treatments and for whom they might or might not work,” Dr. Nawas says. “That experience is rapidly developing, and unless you have the luxury of focusing on one specific area, it’s very hard to stay completely up to date. The idea is that we help our colleagues offer the most modern understanding of the disease and the most modern therapies.”

For more information visit uchicagomedicineadventhealth.org or call 855-231-2336.