People Have a Choice When It Comes to Cancer Care: Location Matters!
Community cancer care provides numerous benefits to patients, caregivers, insurers, and employers. Patients don’t need to go to large hospitals or cancer centers when they can receive the highest quality, innovative, and cost-effective care right in their own communities. ECHO is the leading community-based, independent oncology practice serving the needs of patients throughout Connecticut.
Superior Quality of Care
The ECHO team is comprised of exceptional board-certified oncologists and hematologists who have trained at leading healthcare institutions across the globe. We are consistently recognized for excellence, including recent acknowledgment by Pequot Health Care as a 2021 Center of Excellence for Providing High-Value Cancer Care in Connecticut. In June of 2020, Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and Pequot Health Care selected ECHO as a Preferred Partner. Patients regularly share feedback that not only do they receive the highest quality care, but they are grateful for an outstanding patient experience from the moment they walk in our door.
Click here to see patient testimonials about how the ECHO team goes above and beyond to ensure personalized, compassionate and dedicated care.
Innovative
ECHO serves at the forefront of technology with our commitment to research and clinical trials. We currently offer more than two dozen leading clinical trials and have a full-time Director of Research who matches the right trials to the patient population. Patients don’t need to venture to large tertiary hospitals; many of the same clinical trials are offered much closer to home, in our community-based practice, where patients have their support systems in place.
Click here to see a list of all our current clinical trials>
Cost-Effective
An increasing number of medications are being developed as either injectables or intravenous drugs. A subset of these drugs, known as specialty medications, provides a highly sophisticated treatment, generally when there are few or no other treatment options available. Some of the benefits of specialty medications include the reduction in the number of relapses; prevention of disability progression; symptom management; maintenance and/ or improvement of quality of life; and, sometimes, disease remission or cures.
These specialty medications come at relatively high costs. When these drugs are administered in hospital-based outpatient departments, there is a huge increase in cost to patients, insurers, and employers. Often these medications cost 3 times more than the physician’s office rate. Employers could cut spending by $14.1 billion by shifting patients away from more costly hospital settings or by negotiating site-neutral pricing for specialty medications.
Comprehensive Care
When patients face cancer, they want all their resources in one convenient place, in a location close to home. As a community-based practice, we pride ourselves on providing all the services a patient needs in a warm and inviting setting. This includes a full-service chemotherapy and hematology infusion suite, in-house laboratory testing, access to leading research and national clinical trials, a dedicated nurse navigator, a genetics risk assessment program, affiliation with leading cancer rehabilitation programs, and a palliative
care program.
Click here to learn about our unique palliative care program.
Dedicated to Continuous Improvement
ECHO is a proud participant in the OneOncology network, a partnership of community oncologists united in the mission of improving community oncology care. This organization was created to bring together world-class oncologists, powered by leading-edge technology, and powerful data to transform the way cancer care is delivered on four key dimensions: cost, quality, access, and the patient experience. As part of this network, ECHO benefits from the shared clinical expertise, research, and advancements in care from leading cancer care organizations around the world.
These are just some of the many advantages of community-based care. Perhaps most important is how our patients feel that they benefit from a full service, personalized approach, delivered by premier specialists, right in their local community. Click here to read what dozens of patients have to share about their experiences at ECHO.