How AnMed's Cancer Support Services team is meeting Commission on Cancer survivorship standards and giving patients a year a self-directed way to engage with survivorship care.
AnMed is the primary healthcare organization in Anderson, SC. Anderson is home to over 203,000 residents, and the county spans 713.9 square miles. Our CoC and NAPBC accredited community cancer center serves our community as well as residents from Northeast Georgia, Pickens, and Oconee counties. Our area has experienced a significant rate of growth over the past few years, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The coast of South Carolina is a quick 3–4-hour drive, and we can access the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains within 2 hours. Our own town boasts access to several lakes, with Lake Hartwell being the largest. These features make it a popular retirement destination and a great place to live.
AnMed Cancer Center is our community’s primary provider of cancer care. We have over 1,200 analytic cancer cases a year and this number continues to climb with the growth of our community. We offer surgical treatment, medical oncology, GYN oncology, and radiation oncology care. Cancer support services are comprised of a team of site-specific nurse navigators, a financial navigator, mental health counselor, and dietitian. My role as manager is to steer the support ship.
Survivorship care at AnMed has been through several changes, in the attempt to keep up with changing standards and expectations from the Commission on Cancer. Our organization has a deep desire to provide our patients with a variety of survivorship services beyond the expected clinical care, but those resources are not readily available or accessible in our community.
We became early adopters of The After Cancer platform because it is an excellent compilation of many of the services we were pursuing, except even more patient-centered because our patients can decide which aspects are of most importance to them.
We once had the great fortune to have Dr. Chasse Bailey-Dorton on our staff and had the benefit of offering her early iterations of “Survivor School” to our local patients. She went on to pursue her passion for cancer survivorship and integrative medicine, and we continued to try to bring new survivorship offerings to our community. We have been able to come full circle by adopting The After Cancer platform as a survivorship tool for our patients, with content provided by Dr. Bailey-Dorton along with other cancer and survivorship professionals. This platform is unique in the ability to provide reporting back to our team that we can share with the cancer committee and utilize as a demonstration of adherence to standards. It also helps us to know what aspects of survivorship are most important to our community.
We have on-site survivorship services as well. We offer oncology rehab services-PT, OT, lymphedema therapy, and exercise-based classes. We also have counseling, dietitian services, and financial services. The After Cancer comes in as a complement to those in-person services and provides on-going offerings that patients can access wherever they are. This is important to our patients that are anxious to get back to work or have schedules that don’t allow them to take advantage of what we have on site.
I look forward to a continued partnership with The After Cancer and learning more about how our patients are interacting with the services.
Melissa Kimbrell has been supporting cancer patients and families in the Upstate community since 2004. As a Nurse Navigator, she guides patients through each step of their care with compassion, understanding, and expertise. She leads the Support Services Team, working to make sure every patient receives coordinated, patient‑centered support throughout their treatment journey. Melissa earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Clemson University and is certified as an Oncology Certified Nurse (OCN®). She obtained a Certificate in Clinical Cancer Genomics Risk Assessment, from the Intensive Course in Genomic Cancer Risk Assessment, City of Hope National Medical Center, Division of Clinical Cancer Genomics in 2026.