Quality medical care can be found in every specialty and in every corner of the country. Sometimes, though, through a combination of talent, hard work, resources, funding, and leadership, a clinical center rises above the pack in certain specialties.

With this issue of Urology Times, we launch a new series about Clinical Centers of Excellence. The first installment looks at centers that excel in the area of prostate cancer.

The purpose of the series is to recognize those institutions that bring something extra to the specialty, whether through research, patient care, community outreach, or all of these areas. It is designed to provide physicians with a valuable tool when considering where to refer challenging cases.

Geography is a factor as well: Patients, after all, are more likely to visit a center that is nearby than one across the country.

The institutions profiled in this issue—Cleveland Clinic, the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, the Mayo Clinic, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center—have prostate cancer programs that are among the finest in the country.

Although we could not profile them all, we have included a list of the other Clinical Centers of Excellence identified through surveys and our discussions with urology KOLs. We do not rank the centers relative to each other; rather, we explain what makes each one unique.

Clinical Centers of Excellence:

Prostate Cancer

• Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Los Angeles

• Cleveland Clinic
Cleveland

• Duke University Medical Center
Durham, NC

• Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
Baltimore

• Loyola University Medical Center
Chicago

• Mayo Clinic
Rochester, MN

• Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
New York

• University of California, San Francisco Medical Center
San Francisco

• University of Iowa Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center
Iowa City

• University of Kansas Medical Center
Kansas City, KS

• University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
Houston

• Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Nashville, TN

• Washington University Medical Center
St. Louis

Clinical Centers of Excellence:

Selection Criteria

Institutions under consideration to be named Clinical Centers of Excellence are asked to self-report data and other information, which is checked against publicly available information. These criteria may include:

• Quality improvement initiatives under way
• Community outreach
• National awards and recognition
• Number of referrals for the particular specialty area
• Number of international referrals
• Number of patients treated/procedures performed per year
• Number of research protocols engaged in annually
• Systems in place to prevent errors
• Outcomes data (eg, mortality/morbidity rates, unnecessary readmission rates, etc.)
• Level of technological equipment on site
• Follow-up care programs (eg, enforcement of secondary prevention/medication compliance)
• Patient education efforts
• Patient satisfaction survey results
• Infectious disease prevention efforts
• Evidence of incorporating research and clinical care
• Faculty publishing records.