Idea to Arm Cancer Patients with Information Specific to Their Disease and Treatment Receives Nod, Grant from American Canc...( Individual DVDs Developed By McLar...),Health

Individual DVDs Developed By McLaren Health Care's Great Lakes Cancer

Institute Will Be Expanded With $102,000, Three-Year Grant Program Goal To Provide National Availability Of DVDs, Web sites To Cancer

Patients

FLINT, Mich., Nov. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Providing cancer patients with the information they need to actively participate in their healing may become an easier task thanks to a grant from the American Cancer Society to McLaren Health Care's Great Lakes Cancer Institute. The $102,000 grant, administered over three years, aims to make individual patient DVDs and secure Web sites, created by McLaren's Great Lakes Cancer Institute, something that will eventually be available to cancer patients nationwide.

The DVDs, introduced two years ago at GLCI's Ingham Regional campus in Lansing, Mich., include a personal introduction and biography by the patient's doctor, as well as specific information about the stage and form of their cancer; what to expect as a standard of care; types of therapies available to them and strategies the caregiver team expects to use to treat the cancer. The DVD is updated as needed each time the patient comes in for treatment.

Patients will soon be able to access all the information on the DVDs online by accessing their profile with a user name and password on a secure Web site. The individual patient pages will include links to other resources and will be updated on the same schedule as the DVD.

"Once a patient hears the word 'cancer,' they are shocked and may not be able to retain much information you tell them at the moment," said Ray Demers, M.D., President and CEO of the Great Lakes Cancer Institute. "We also thought there had to be a better way of giving patients the information they need to be strong advocates in their own healing then handing them reams of information that has nothing to do with their specific form of cancer; or with the team of physicia
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