New $10-Million Cancer Center to Open : Medicine: Westlake Medical Center is hopeful the treatment facility will lure Valley patients from other local hospitals.

Gambling that San Fernando Valley cancer patients may switch their care from other local hospitals, Westlake Medical Center will open a new $10-million cancer center on Monday that offers both inpatient and outpatient treatment.

The new cancer center straddling the Los Angeles-Ventura County border is a joint operation with Salick Health Care Inc., a national health care provider that operates nine other comprehensive cancer centers across the country, including one at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

It will also boast the talents of Dr. Robert Peter Gale, a pioneer in bone marrow transplants renowned for his work with victims of the Chernobyl disaster. Gale will serve as the center’s interim director and will head up a bone marrow transplant program at the center.

“This will be a facility as sophisticated as any university facility, but in addition, it will have outpatient and inpatient therapy,” said Bernard Salick, president and owner of Salick Health Care Inc.

“In the past, people who would develop cancer in the Valley would go to a place like UCLA or Cedars, where they could get a full range of services,” Salick said. “Now they can get it in the Conejo Valley.”

Literature about the Salick center indicates treatment there may cost patients less than in a hospital because most procedures at the center will be done on an outpatient basis.

The cancer center is a risk for both Salick Health Care and Westlake Medical Center. Salick’s other centers rely on the hospitals they adjoin for inpatient care. At Westlake, for the first time, the corporation will coordinate outpatient and inpatient units, allowing its 33-member medical staff to follow patients from diagnosis through all stages of illness.

Westlake Medical Center, for its part, has invested $5 million in a venture it does not control and handed over 40% of its hospital space to the largely autonomous center. In exchange, it gains the prospect of added revenue for an institution that last year had an average patient occupancy rate of 26%.

Hospital officials say, however, that they are confident they will see a generous return on their investment. Patient interest in the center is already at a high pitch, said K.D. Justyn, the hospital’s managing director.

“Every day since we’ve announced (the center’s opening), we’ve had multiple phone calls from patients wondering when it will be open,” she said.

Administrators at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, however, say the new cancer center offers little besides a bone marrow transplant program that they don’t already have at their hospital, which has its own oncology unit and radiation facilities.

Westlake Medical Center and Los Robles are about 10 miles apart and sometimes compete for the same pool of patients.

“I really think it’s a big duplication of services at a time when health care dollars are shrinking and the public thinks we cost too much already,” said Carol Freeman, vice president in charge of planning and development for Los Robles.

The facility that will open at Westlake Medical Center on Monday is a 12,000-square-foot, outpatient complex where patients can come for examinations, minor procedures and chemotherapy treatments.

Over the next six months, the center will add a nine-bed inpatient facility and bone marrow transplant unit, plus an off-site breast cancer center, located in a building at Westlake Boulevard and Agoura Road.

When Westlake Medical Center completes its construction of a new north wing in 24 to 36 months, the center will also gain a radiation therapy unit, bringing the center’s total size to 50,000 square feet.

Until the radiation unit is completed, patients will be sent to Tarzana for radiation therapy, center officials say.

“They put the patient first and I like that, and they’ve got an aggressive, coordinated, intelligent approach to medicine, and I like that,” said Dr. Michael Masterson, a Thousand Oaks oncologist who is giving up his solo practice near Los Robles Regional Medical Center to devote himself full time to the cancer center.

“This is going to be dynamite. It’s going to be a lot of fun to work there.”

The center has its own mini-lab and its own pharmacy, designed to minimize the wait for patients awaiting treatment, said Pamela Kapustay, the center’s nursing director and a specialist in clinical oncology for the last 20 years. Homey treatment rooms give patients who are well enough the option of receiving chemotherapy treatment in a cushioned, reclining armchair as well as in a hospital bed, Kapustay said.

Patients may also have one friend or family member with them at all times when receiving treatment, and each patient space has its own television and VCR, she said.

Most significantly, she said, patients who might otherwise check into a hospital overnight for treatment need only stay at the center for the length of the procedure before going home for the night.

“We’ve always had home care, and we’ve always had hospital care, but in my mind, this is the missing link,” Kapustay said.