Lombardi Reaches Out: In the Clinic, on the Air

 

 

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In 1986, Elmer Huerta, MD, MPH, asked himself why people who knew so much about soap opera plots and soccer statistics knew so little about mammograms or preventive health.

“I was working in the triage unit of the National Cancer Institute of Peru, and patients were coming to me with tumors the size of baseballs, or even bigger,” he recalls. “When I asked them why they didn’t come to see a doctor sooner, they said ‘Because it didn’t hurt.’”

And yet his patients could recite the latest entertainment news and were predicting who would win the Copa Perú. To Huerta, the answer was clear: Media bombardment with entertainment and sports news made it impossible to ignore.

He decided to contact the media himself and met with producers and managers at local radio and TV stations in Lima. To his surprise, they did not have a good understanding of health and prevention either.

“So I told them, let me produce shows for you to get my message across about health,” he recounts. “And I convinced the media to give me radio and TV segments.”

Knowing nothing about the mechanics of a show, Huerta relied on his bedside manner and his medical knowledge to create the segments. He was a huge success, but he knew he needed to do more.

Leading Cancer Advocacy

Fast forward to 2008. Huerta runs the only Cancer Preventorium in the United States – a clinic for healthy people who want to speak with a doctor about prevention. A member of Georgetown’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center (though based at Washington Hospital Center’s Cancer Institute), he conducts extensive research with local Hispanic communities in the Washington area.

Huerta, in association with Jeanne Mandelblatt, MD, MPH, associate director for population sciences at Lombardi, has two grants from the National Cancer Institute to bring cancer research into Hispanic community clinics.

“We are working with local communities to inject cancer research onto their radar screen,” says Huerta.

On top of all this, Huerta also served as president of the American Cancer Society (ACS), the largest cancer advocacy organization in the United States, and has remained on the organization’s board since his term ended last year.

Building the Cancer Preventorium

Huerta’s first radio segment in the United States aired on December 4, 1989. In fact, Huerta’s first order of business upon arrival in Baltimore (where he was enrolled in an internal medicine residency program in order to receive certification to practice in the United States), had been to find a Spanish-language radio station willing to partner with him on his health outreach efforts.

“The first thing any immigrant does when they arrive someplace new is to look for media broadcasting in your own language,” he explains. “I was no different.”

He produced a series on tobacco and the risks of smoking. The five-minute segments were broadcast three times a day. By the end of the month, the show was so popular that the station asked Huerta to produce a daily segment. But as a resident, he had little time to spare outside of the hospital.

“I needed a plan so the show wouldn’t be a burden on me. I decided to choose an article from JAMA, NEJM, Lancet or one of the other top medical journals and put the story in common words,” he says. That one-minute segment has aired every day for the past 19 years on Washington’s Radio America affiliate.

Less than five years later, Huerta got the chance to make his second dream come true. The Cancer Preventorium opened at the Washington Cancer Institute on July 27, 1994. In less than three weeks, the clinic was booked with patient appointments through December.

The clinic is designed to serve the large, low-income Latino population in the Washington metropolitan area. It is run as a fee-for-service clinic, with patients paying $120 out-of-pocket to see Huerta when they are healthy.

He describes preventive health as a revolutionary concept for the population he’s targeting. While doctors recommend a yearly physical or check-up with a primary care physician, most people tend to only visit a doctor when they are sick. This is especially true in immigrant communities, who may not have learned about the benefits of preventive health and may not have access to insurance or quality healthcare.

Now 15 years later, Huerta has never run out of patients. By May 2008, he was booked through October. He has seen more than 22,000 patients, 80 percent of whom are female. He has discovered 75 cancers, around half of which were breast cancers. Most often he finds early symptoms of heart disease or diabetes.

When a patient needs follow-up care – for cancer or any other disease – Huerta’s patient navigator works with them to find a primary care doctor, find resources to cover any costs, and enroll in clinical trials if they are available.

Communicating the Message

Huerta’s days follow a regular pattern. At 11:30 every morning, he sits down at the digital recording studio in the corner of his office at Washington Hospital Center to record two, 15-minute shows, followed by a two-hour, nationally syndicated call-in show at 1:00.

Tuesday through Thursday, Huerta sees patients in the hours between shows. Scattered throughout the week are one more radio segment, three weekly television shows, and constant requests from local, national, and even international stations looking for a doctor to comment on the latest health studies. For example, in mid-May he rushed to Univision studios in DC one morning to tape a segment about the finding that a chemical in plastics, called BPA, may cause cancer.

But he is not done yet. Huerta wants to expand the clinic, bringing on additional physicians or nurse practitioners to see patients. He is also constantly working to bring the message of preventive health to more people. For example, he is working with Univision, a Spanish-language television station with 98 percent market penetration, to develop a medical editor position in its news department. He hopes this will inspire more health coverage.

To learn more about Huerta, and listen to his radio shows, visit his website www.prevencion.org.

By Allison Whitney, excerpted from the Summer 2008 issue of Lombardi Magazine