Page 18 - Healthcare News 2023 Healthcare Heroes

HEALTHCARE HEROES OF WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS
Dr. Laki Rousou never stopped trying to recruit Ashely LeBlanc to manage the thoracic-surgery practice at Mercy Medical Center, and he — and many others — are glad he didn’t.
Over the past seven years, LeBlanc has put a number of line items on the ‘World Conquering Plans’ list, and made most
of them reality, especially a lung cancer screening program, which wasn’t even on her radar screen when she finally agreed to interview for the job.
Indeed, she was prepared to talk about patient education and how to improve it and make it more comprehensive when Rousou and Chuang changed things up and focused on a screening program.
Thinking Big
Once she got the job, she focused on both, with some dramatic and far-reaching results.
As for the screening program, she said such initiatives were new at the time because the Centers for Medicare Services had only recently approved insurance coverage for such screenings. At Mercy, with Rousou, Chuang, and, increasingly, LeBlanc charting a course, extensive research was undertaken with the goal of incorporating best practices from existing programs into Mercy’s initiative.
“We had no idea what our expectations should be or how it would be received in the community — it was a very new thing,” she recalled. “That first month in 2017, we did seven scans; then we did 29, and by
“When patients are diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, the treatment is,
by and large, palliative, not curative. Which makes it extra important to
try to diagnose these people with lung cancer at an e”arlier stage.
which brings us back to the point where she kept saying ‘no’ and eventually said ‘yes’ to Rousou and Chuang (who is no longer with the practice).
Staff Photo
Rousou told BusinessWest they recruited her heavily because they knew she would be perfect for the role they had carved out — and they were right.
Michael Barbara-Jean James Ryan Henry “Hank” Joe Doug Candace Lynch DeLoria Montemayor Hess Downey Kulig Gilbert Pereira
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H18 2023
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