Here’s a radical notion: Build a one-stop, state-of-the-art breast care hospital where patients come first. Some people thought Beth DuPree was nuts, but for nearly two years, she actually pulled it off. Now she’s fighting to keep her dream alive.
If Beth DuPree, MD, FACS, founder of the country’s first stand-alone breast care hospital, worked as a TV anchor, she’d be saddled with the “perky blonde” label. The day we first meet, in October 2008, she downloads the abridged history of Beth Baughman DuPree in the time it takes us to walk from the waiting area to her office, a grown-up version of a princess bedroom, missing only the canopy bed. She’s running late, she says, because she’s been on the phone with her sister (DuPree is the youngest of seven kids of a York, Pennsylvania, cop and a homemaker), and over the weekend they’d had to move their parents (her mom has Alzheimer’s) out of the house they’d lived in for 46 years. So that was hard. Plus her center’s parent company has just gotten a new CEO, one of her employees has been hospitalized with chest pain, and she had to fire another for lying. “But since I’m not one of the people I’m treating, it’s a good day anyway,” she concludes with a smile.
And for those she’s treating today, it’s not as bad as it might have been. DuPree, 48, a surgeon and lecturer with a slew of awards, built this five-star, one-stop, mammo-to-mastectomy-to- reconstruction center in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, because the idea of women running to 10 different places for consultations, tests, surgery and adjuvant therapies was anathema to her. That kind of care is designed “for the convenience of hospitals, not patients,” she tells me as we reach her office. DuPree especially hates hearing from women who, after finding a lump, are forced to wait weeks to get an appointment with a surgeon at a time when a day can feel like a decade. So in April 2007, she opened her 24-bed, bricks-and-mortar alter ego in the outsize hope of redefining care for the one in eight American women who learn they have breast cancer.It’s 8:15 AM, and DuPree has already worked out for an hour with her “NFL two-time Super Bowl guy” trainer, aka Vaughn Hebron, who may or may not have been trying to kill her with crunches; she has also learned that one of her friends from the gym has just found a breast lump. “She can’t wait around” for an appointment, DuPree tells the scheduler. At the Comprehensive Breast Care Institute, friends always go to the front of the line.
