Transcript generated from the episode’s audio. Speaker names are identified from the context of the conversation rather than from recorded speaker data, and automatic transcription may misspell names and terminology. Please refer to the video for the authoritative version.

David Raubach: Well, I want to thank you for joining us on today’s episode of the Cancer Project podcast. We are really fortunate to be joined by Hadley Ford, founder and former CEO of Procure Proton Therapy Centers. Procure was really one of the creators of the proton modern proton therapy industry and we’re going to talk all about the history of that company and how Hadley got involved and just his perspective now as he sees the legacy that Procure and he had on the proton therapy industry. So Hadley, thank you so much for joining us.

Hadley Ford: My absolute pleasure, David. Happy to be here.

David Raubach: I got to ask, what’s that in the background behind you there? That looks very interesting.

Hadley Ford: You know, I’m not really sure. I’m you know I’m retired now. So I just borrowed someone’s office to do this.

David Raubach: Oh, that’s not… It looked like an old like Chinese rug that you know 500 years old or something from some dynasty.

Hadley Ford: Yeah, it could be. I don’t know. I’m in Albuquerque, so it could be Chinese, could be local Native Americans. I don’t know. I didn’t really look at it. I just came in and I attempted to blur it, but my computer’s as you know had a little malware problem. So, it’s not taking on the hardware capabilities of blurring the background for me.

David Raubach: Well, you know, that can happen. So, so I would love to just dive right in and go right back to the beginning. Tell me what was the first point in time when you heard about proton therapy or heard the term proton therapy?

Hadley Ford: So we got to go way back give a little context. So, you know, 20, 30 years ago, I was a banker at Goldman, and I worked on a deal for a new alternative communications network based out of San Francisco. And the general counsel on that deal was a guy named Kevin Cameron, who you will recognize as the son of Dr. Cameron, who becomes very important to the story. And Kevin and I became very close and doing that deal. And I’d say 2 or 3 years after the deal had closed, I’d stayed in touch and whatnot. He gave me a call and said you know my father’s working on something and you know it appears to be a cure for cancer and he’s trying to put together a business and you know since you’re a banker and you help guys do that maybe you could have a phone call with them.

Hadley Ford: And because Kevin was a good friend and he had paid me lots of fees, I said, “Sure, I’ll give a little free advice and, you know, we’ll see how it goes.” So I got on the phone with Dr. Cameron and he explained this crazy thing, proton therapy, and that he was doing something up there at IU and I guess he was running like a bunch of proton research for the government, but in kind of in the off hours or whatnot, he developed this proton therapy center and he had done that in such a manner that had reduced the cost, reduced the operating costs and all these wonderful things.

Hadley Ford: And he had this vision that he could build proton therapy centers in a community setting and bring this great technology out into the community and I thought that sounded pretty interesting. So I actually flew out to Bloomington, Indiana. At the time I think they still had a direct flight from Luard.

David Raubach: Oh right.

Hadley Ford: Yeah. Which after I joined forces with Dr. Cameron, of course they then cancelled that flight and had to India and drive down. But I went out to see him and we talked about it. It sounded very interesting and I came back to New York and I ran a few numbers and did a little research and had a couple more phone calls with him and I was on the phone with him and I said, “You know, Dr. Cameron, with all due respect, you’re, you know, a great physicist and a great visionary, but you really need someone who could sort of be the day-to-day CEO or, you know, someone who can pull the business side together.

Hadley Ford: And, you know, with your permission, I’ve got a couple guys and I could call them and introduce you and see if they’re interested,” and he said, “Sure, that would be great.” So I hung up the phone with him and I literally got like four digits into the number of a guy I was going to call and I stopped and I said to myself, “Gee, Hadley, you know, if this is like such a great idea, why are you calling somebody else?

David Raubach: Right. Right.

Hadley Ford: Why don’t you throw your own hat in the ring? So I hung up and I called Dr. Cameron back and he said, “Oh, thanks, Hadley. We just hung up.” I said, “Well, you know, a crazy idea occurred to me, you know, you’re going to need someone to give you a lot of advice on capital formation and strategy and business development and partnerships and things here because it’s a very complex situation. There’s no readily available capital. These things cost, you know, boatloads of dough, and you know how are you going to put these deals together with hospitals and doctor groups.

Hadley Ford: There’s a lot of regulatory stuff and I said so I thought you know you could hire me as an agent and pay me a big fee and you know pay my bank a big fee or I could quit my highly paid job and I could be your partner and you’d get all that for free.” And for those of you had the good fortune of knowing Dr. Cameron, he was an old Scots-Irishman. And there was this long pause and he said, “You know, I like free.” And that was the start of it.

David Raubach: Oh my gosh.

Hadley Ford: Actually got on a plane and flew back out and we had breakfast at the Grant Street Inn. I get a I hope hopefully I’ll get some type of payment for having said that.

David Raubach: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Hadley Ford: And at breakfast, we actually took out a napkin and we wrote down sort of the five key tenants of the business plan, the first one was children will have access.

David Raubach: Mhm.

Hadley Ford: That was the number one piece of the business plan. I forget what the other four things were, but that was number one. We each put a dollar on the table, the original cap table was 50/50 each for a dollar.

David Raubach: Wow.

Hadley Ford: We shook hands and that was it. We started up the company. We had no patents, no no money, no anything. And that was the genesis of it. Just a dream to make proton therapy available for kids. And that’s how it all got going.

David Raubach: And so what had you learned about their setup at IU? What I mean because obviously you went looked at the equipment.

Hadley Ford: He had given me a tour of it and I met with Nick who ended up being our chief physicist and I met with Dr. Thornton who was a leader in the space back then from a research and cheerleading perspective for proton therapy. So I had a rudimentary understanding, probably no better than my understanding now, but you know it seemed to me to be a much better solution if you had to go down the road of radiation. You know, you eliminate the stray radiation and have it much more targeted, and that made a lot of sense to me. And Dr. Cameron’s vision and his ability to, you know, reduce the cost by a fairly significant factor with some of his innovations and some of the thoughts Nick had on, you know, different uses of hardware and whatnot.

Hadley Ford: We developed a lot of that once we got the company going. That all made sense, and, you know, I thought I could go on raising money for companies that were improving telecom, or I could help change the lives of people who are suffering from cancer and tumors. And I made the choice, and it was a great partnership with Dr. Jay, as we like to call them.

David Raubach: Yeah. So what’s next? So you have a company that’s valued at $2.

Hadley Ford: Yeah. At that point.

David Raubach: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Hadley Ford: That was maybe gonna get you through the on it and made it worth negative.

David Raubach: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So what what’s next? What’s kind of like the first couple phone calls?

Hadley Ford: There’s a couple things. I’ve done a lot of startups over the years and built a lot of businesses, actually external and internal to corporations. And there’s two things that matter. One are the people and the second are is the money, right? You got to have the people who can execute and you got to have the A+ players. So, Dr. Cameron and I put together a list of kind of a who’s who list of who we wanted on the team, and we went out and spoke with them and we got them to join the team. And we figured out how we’re going to raise some money, and we did a little angel round amongst ourselves and raised a little bit of dough, and then we did a little bit broader raise. I think we raised probably, you know, 10ish million dollars, sort of among friends and families, and there’s some fairly amusing stories along the way with that.

Hadley Ford: And then, at the same time, we were talking with lenders both here and over in Europe. And strangely, I didn’t realize this even though I was a banker, I didn’t do a lot of project finance, but apparently US banks are not, at least at the time we’re not, particularly keen in project finance. So most of the fruitful discussions we had were out of Europe, a couple out of Australia, but the longer term capital we needed to develop one of these projects was something that was going to happen internationally. And then, you know, we laid out the specs and sort of what equipment we wanted.

Hadley Ford: And ultimately we came to rest on working with IBA, and one of the reasons we worked with them is they actually were in Belgium and there was some incentives through the government there on providing insurance back stops to the lending piece which makes the lenders comfortable, and we worked with a lot of the local lenders there and putting together the initial capital structure.

Hadley Ford: And along the way we were fortunate enough to work with a doctor group in Oklahoma City. And one of the thoughts we had to see is we’re going to need a big equity slug next to debt we’re raising. And we thought, you know, this has two returns to it. It’s got a nice economic return. So, you know, a sophisticated equity investor, we’ll see that. But also has a big psychic return, you know, what it can do for the community, what it can do from the world perspective, and being a showcase for proton therapy. And literally we put together a list of sort of the wealthy guys in Oklahoma City, and you know we had this list, 10, 15 guys and couple of gals on there as well I’m sure.

Hadley Ford: And my head of bisdev at the time was a guy named James Jarrett, and James looked at the list, he goes, oh, he goes, “Look at that. Aubrey McClendon’s on a list there. He’s my brother actually works with Aubrey,” and James’s brother was, I don’t know, some junior engineer or something like that.

Hadley Ford: But Aubrey had a pretty good reputation for being man of the people, and they had a nice gym on the Chesapeake campus, and Aubrey used to work out every morning there at like 6:00 in the morning, and James’s brother used to work out around the same time. So God’s honest true story. Aubrey’s on the treadmill, like walking or running or whatever he’s doing, and James’s brother goes over, gets on the next treadmill. He’s like, “Yay, Mr. McClendon.” Then Aubrey was great at remembering people’s names. So he says, you know, I can’t remember James’s brother’s name. So he says, “Yeah, hey, James’s brother. How you doing? What’s new?”

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: And he says, “Well, you know, my brother’s working on this project.” And he explains the project while they’re on side by side on the treadmills. And Aubrey says, “Geez, you should have your brother call, you know, my consigliere, my good friend Shannon Self.”

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: He helped Aubrey with kind of all his family office investing and whatnot. And Aubrey, as you may remember, was a big booster for Oklahoma City, man. Did tons of good work when, you know, sort of redeveloping the downtown and bringing the thunder to town. And he thought this project was just a perfect fit with what his vision for the city was for. So he became the big equity component next to debt.

Hadley Ford: Actually there’s an amusing component to that as well. You know, he’s doing his diligence and he had his whole team and whatnot. And at one point he said okay we have to have dinner and all the parties can come together. So we had our physician group and we had the procure team and we had Aubrey’s team and we went to one of his restaurants. I forget which one. And we had Red Prime, I think.

David Raubach: Was it Red Prime Steakhouse?

Hadley Ford: I don’t think it was Red Prime. Actually, I know it wasn’t Red Prime. We’d had a bunch of meetings there in that old silo thing, but it was one of the other ones. Had a big room in the back. Can’t remember. Very

David Raubach: Yeah, it was the one that was… It’s not there anymore. It was by the campus. It was by the Chesapeake campus.

Hadley Ford: Exactly. That’s the one. It’s a big room in the back. Very kind of old world looking. Big table. We must have had 20 people around the table, and I’m sitting right next to Aubrey, and he kind of stops. I think it was kind of after the dinner before dessert arrived. He says, “Oh, you know, why don’t we, it’s been a very pleasant dinner. Let’s get down to business. Why don’t we go around the table, everyone can introduce themselves to everyone, and kind of how they got involved with proton therapy,” kind of similar to the questions you’re asking me. And it moves off to his left, and I’m sitting to his immediate right, and it goes around the table, and, you know, I’m Dr.

Hadley Ford: Goat, I’m Dr. Taylor, I’m John. You know, it goes around, and it comes to James Jarrett who’s sitting to my right. He says about his business development background, tells the story about his brother. Everyone gets a chuckle. And then it comes to me and I just give a little sort of quick CV, and I’m going to hand it back off to Aubrey, and then James, who had a little bit too much of Aubrey’s fine wine.

Hadley Ford: You know, Aubrey always set a good table. He says, oh, you didn’t tell Aubrey about how you were a juggler in Europe back in the day. And I said no. I said, “James, yeah, I’m sure Aubrey’s not particularly interested in my vagabound youth. He’s probably more interested in the merits of the deal and all this good stuff.” And Aubrey looks at me and says, “Oh, you were a juggler in Europe.” I said, “Yeah, yeah, I was a juggler in Europe for a couple of years.”

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: And he says, “Oh, you know, one of my childhood best friends was a juggler in Europe. Maybe you know him.” And I’m thinking, you know, like all the juggling, what are the chances, right?

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: And I said, “Well, yeah, you know, maybe. Aubrey, what was his name?” And Aubrey says, “Scotty.” And I finish the sentence. I say, “Hutton.” Scotty was my juggling partner. It was a good friend. Aubrey takes out his phone, calls Scotty from the table.

David Raubach: Oh my gosh.

Hadley Ford: It says, “What kind of guy is this guy Hadley?” And it’s like, you hear this?

David Raubach: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Hadley Ford: Aubrey’s asking questions the way he does. Conversation goes back and forth for five minutes. The room is dead silent. Aubrey hangs up the phone. He goes, “You checked out.” Says, “Give me that big bottle of wine,” and hand over like a Magnum or Jerobo, big things. He takes out a silver Sharpie out of his pocket, kind of whips it out, and he’s like, he signs on the label, looks across the table to the guy leading the diligence, John Fick, he goes, “How much money did we say?” John says, “X.” He writes down X. Says, “What percentage of the company are we going to get?” John says, “Why.” Writes down why. Aubrey signs it. He goes, “You sign this.” Okay. I sign it. Terms never change. We closed the deal on those terms.

David Raubach: That’s unbelievable. Contract written on a wine bottle.

Hadley Ford: Yeah.

David Raubach: And you got… And you had the wine bottle at the corporate office, right?

Hadley Ford: Yeah. We actually had, we made another copy. So we had two bottles. So he kept the original and then we created a replica that we had at the corporate office.

David Raubach: Yeah, that’s amazing. So yeah, when you’re going through, you know, document retention, it’s like, oh, well, actually, here’s the contract over here behind this glass case.

Hadley Ford: Yeah, that’s amazing. Oh, exactly.

David Raubach: Yeah, it’s pretty good. That story, it’s interesting the situation with James Jarrett’s brother

Hadley Ford: Yeah.

David Raubach: running next to Aubrey on the treadmill. Cuz I had a somewhat similar experience with this, with how I got connected to the center. My father-in-law worked for Aubrey.

Hadley Ford: Okay.

David Raubach: And Aubrey had Founders Club tickets for the Thunder games. And my father-in-law was an executive vice president. And so we would go, of course he would go a lot more than I would, but then he would bring his family.

Hadley Ford: Yeah.

David Raubach: His daughter, who I was married to, myself, some of his other kids, a couple times a year.

Hadley Ford: Mhm.

David Raubach: And so we were in the founders club and I found myself next sitting next to Aubrey at the bar, or he walked up as I was ordering a drink and he was about to order a drink, and I was straight out of grad school, you know, and in grad school they do that training where it’s like, oh, if you ever find yourself sitting on a plane next to a really important person, like what’s the question that you’re going to ask them? Like be prepared.

Hadley Ford: Yeah.

David Raubach: And so I had my like NBA school question ready to go, and I asked Aubrey, I said, “You know, you’ve done a lot of things with your company, but what I’m really curious about is what are you most proud of or most interested in that’s not related to Chesapeake Energy,” which is a company that everybody knew him for. And he, without missing a beat, was like, “Oh man, let me tell you about this new cancer center.” And at the time the proton center in Oklahoma City was just about to open, and he’s like, “Oh, proton therapy, and it’s going to change the way cancer’s treated, and I’m so excited, and I’m a big investor.” And then he did the whole like, “Oh, you’re young. What are you doing with your life, you should go check it out. You know, I think they’re looking for good people over there.”

Hadley Ford: How is it that I never heard this story before?

David Raubach: I don’t know. I don’t know. And so, I was like, you know, I mean, I guess I’m 26 at the time and didn’t have any kids, and it was like, and I was working in the oil and gas industry for a small private oil and gas company.

Hadley Ford: And so, well, you were in Oklahoma City, right?

David Raubach: I was in OK. We all have to, 98% of the employment. Yeah. We have to serve our time. It’s like living in Israel and serving in the military. You have to serve your two years in oil and gas. And so, but coincidentally, because you guys had hired a recruiting company to kind of staff up the center.

Hadley Ford: Yeah.

David Raubach: And so completely separate from that conversation, I got a call from a recruiter about the business analyst position at the center in Oklahoma City. And I will say if I had gotten that call and I had not just literally had that conversation with Aubrey a week earlier, I don’t think I would have been like, what is this? I don’t know anything about it. It’s healthcare. I’m in oil and gas. I’m happy. We’re blowing and going. Oil’s $140 a barrel, whatever. But because I had that conversation with Aubrey and he had sent an email to Ed Burles really, the president, was like, “Hey, you should talk to this guy.” So anyways, yeah, it’s kind of random how this thing.

Hadley Ford: Well, we are very fortunate. I don’t want to make you blush, but you are a tremendous addition to the team. And you know, if not for you, there wouldn’t still be a proton therapy center in Oklahoma City.

David Raubach: So yeah, it had shut down back in 2018, end of 2018. So we were fortunate to get it back open.

Hadley Ford: So, let’s, I mean, let’s maybe talk more about the Oklahoma City Center, because you’ve got the money from Aubrey, got access to capital with some lending sources. You’re going to work with IBA. How did the deal, I mean, Oklahoma City is kind of random. It’s not, I mean, at the time, it’s still not that big of a city, relatively speaking. So, how do you end up in Oklahoma City?

David Raubach: Well, the key piece, and you’ll go back to what I originally said, you know, starts with people and then capital. You need those two components. And the, you know, the people part is the driving more important piece. So we had a, one of our partners in the business, guy named Chris Chandler, who had been working with IBA for a long time and was very well known in the proton therapy world. He was doing business development for us, and he knew a lot of physician groups across the US, and we needed a physician group that was a believer in proton therapy, and we needed a physician group that was willing to stake some of their professional career in proton therapy.

David Raubach: And he said that the group headed up by Dr. Goat and Oklahoma City was the one that fit the best, and we came out and met with them, and, you know, that’s how we picked Oklahoma City, primarily because we had good physician partners.

David Raubach: And that’s really how we picked all of our markets, working with the physicians who were going to be supportive of the technology. And that’s how we ended up there, was, it was just that simple. And then, you know, once we picked Oklahoma City as the physician group, that’s where we came up with the list of potential investors, and that’s how Aubrey came up, and then it all kind of went from there. And then we needed a hospital partner, and we spoke with INTEGRIS and we spoke with OU, and we asked them both to, you know, put in their offer on structure. And INTEGRIS, I think, had a very broad and complete vision for combining it with a cancer center and working proton therapy in as one of the solution sets in sort of holistic patient care, and that really resonated with us. So we went with Stan Hutfield and the INTEGRIS team and developed the project from there.

Hadley Ford: So was the Oklahoma City center supposed to be the first center, or was the Chicago center supposed to be the first center?

David Raubach: Yeah, Oklahoma City was the first one. I mean, because we were physician group, we were talking with Dr. Hartzell and that group. But Dr. Goat and his physicians were moving in a much more rapid fashion than the group out of Chicago.

Hadley Ford: Yeah. And then it was also one of the things that was always difficult, you know, proton therapy had been the purview primarily of big academic centers and a lot of research, and it was considered a little esoteric at the time. So the hospitals that you spoke with that it got good traction, generally tended to be academic centers, and academic centers, I don’t know particularly polite way to say about it, but you know they think they can do it all themselves, right, they say, oh, what do we need a third party like a procure who’s going to sort of bring, you know, lower cost and faster implementation to the table, you know, we’re in the business of building buildings and facilities and we can do that.

Hadley Ford: And we actually had our COO was a guy named John Henderson, who was a very talented guy, and he developed a slide for our partnership decks when we go talk with hospitals or academic centers. And you may actually remember this slide, and one half of the slide showed all the component parts of a Ferrari sitting in a driveway, you know, thousands, tens of thousands parts. And the next slide showed a Ferrari sitting in a guy’s driveway, and it said, “Yeah, you could buy all the parts and build the car yourself, or you could just have the car delivered.” It’s, your, we’re the same thing. You know, we’re obviously not an academic center, but we can deliver a proton therapy center to your driveway, you know, much lower cost than anyone else has in the history of proton therapy, in a much shorter time frame, and you’ll have it. It’s just, yeah, you’ll have access to it for your physician groups, your patients, your research, whatever you need.

Hadley Ford: So, you know, that was typically, I would call it, a barrier to entry, but a long lead time when you had a physician group, you needed a hospital partner. And it just moved much more quickly in Oklahoma City than it did in Chicago.

David Raubach: Well, and I think in Chicago too, didn’t you have to go through a certificate of need process?

Hadley Ford: Yes, the old certificate of need. Don’t talk about that, because that was

David Raubach: your first experience with that too. So that had to be a little bit of a shock.

Hadley Ford: Yeah. Going through something like that.

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: And I don’t know if many of your viewers are familiar with certificate of need. It’s basically a guild that keeps all your competition out. It’s something as a throwback to the medieval days that says, “Oh, yeah, you know, we’re going to have the powers that be decide on what services can be provided to patients in this area.” And you know, we don’t want to have too many proton therapy centers because, you know, god forbid too many people would have access to a world change technology. So Chicago had one of these certificate of need boards, and as you can imagine, because it’s basically a gatekeeper to supply, these things are just ripe for collusion and bribery.

Hadley Ford: And, you know, right before we started our process, I think, like, don’t quote me on this, but you know, I think the entire certificate of need board had been found guilty of some type of fraud, or they had gotten rid of everybody, people went to jail, and they had reconstituted the entire, yeah, CON process, but they still kept it in place.

Hadley Ford: And we went up to Chicago, and we’d had a falling out, unfortunately, with Dr. Thornton at the time. We’d picked someone else to sort of be the leadership on the medical side, and Dr. Thornton had joined forces with, I forget, the NIU, right?

David Raubach: Northern Illinois.

Hadley Ford: Northern Illinois. Yeah. Had joined forces with NIU up there. So, you know, we went to go get our CON in Chicago, which, that’s a pretty complicated process. A lot of stuff you got to fill out. You actually have to go to public hearings and all this sort of stuff. And we went in the first round, and the NIU guys threw a bunch of dust in the air, and, you know, sort of confused the entire situation, and, you know, they said that we’re going to build one, and I guess they’re more politically connected than we were. And the CON said that we were denied. And the great sort of crime in all this is that NIU was no closer to having a proton therapy center than kind of the homeless guy in a corner in LA.

David Raubach: Right. Right. Right.

Hadley Ford: You know, they claim that they had a piece of property. They claim they had it financed, but this is not for the faint of heart. I mean, right, you know, these projects are extremely sophisticated. You know, they have as much concrete in one floor as there is in an eight-story building, you know, more electronics and compute power than you have sending, you know, the Artemis moonshot. Yeah, very complex. And, you know, they claimed they had it all lined up. But you know, we actually set up a camera on their job site and set up a doomsday clock and put this thing up on the web.

Hadley Ford: So if anyone ever searched for NIU, it’s the first thing that would pop up, with the lies that they told. And this, literally, a webcam on a telephone pole that showed this empty lot with a rusty chain around it, and the amount of time they had left to finish the project based on what they told the CON board, with a list of, like, all the fastest proton therapy centers ever built in the history of the world.

Hadley Ford: And it was clear they were never gonna have this thing built in a time. It was clear they weren’t even building it. And there’s the part I still can’t believe. So, you know, it took us like another year. We got back in front of the CON and the NIU team showed up again.

David Raubach: Oh my god.

Hadley Ford: They were so pissed off that we put this website up that they actually had printed out screenshot after screenshot after screenshot of the website, saying look what these jerks have done, like these are bad people putting up this website, and they gave these screenshots to the CON board. The CON board like looks at the pieces of paper and goes, well, looks to us like you’re not going to finish this in time. We approve procure.

David Raubach: Oh my gosh.

Hadley Ford: Sort of they sort of like shot themselves in the foot with that whole process. But then we got the green light and we went forward, and of course we built a marvelous center up there with Central DuPage, and I think it’s actually might be Northwestern who’s the hospital partner now.

David Raubach: Yeah. Yeah. They ended up buying it. Yeah. What’s…

Hadley Ford: Yeah.

David Raubach: Well, because Northwestern I think bought Central DuPage.

Hadley Ford: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

David Raubach: A strange coincidence, like the number two finance guy at Central DuPage is a guy who is now the CFO of Scripts and I ran into him the other day.

Hadley Ford: Oh, really? Who is that?

David Raubach: Gez, I’m drawing a blank on his name, but you’d remember him. He worked for Jim. He was Brett Tandy. That’s his name.

Hadley Ford: Okay. Yeah. He was the ex, I think, Morgan Stanley guy.

David Raubach: Okay. But you know, small world, I still run into people who are associated with the projects. I went up to Chicago, probably I want to say it was, well, I think it was when I had joined provision in Knoxville. So this would have been like 2014, ’15, something like that. So yeah, 5 years after the Chicago Center opened, and, some, when I went up there, somebody took me out to and pointed out the Northern Illinois site, and it still was empty and it still had chain link around it.

Hadley Ford: Oh yeah, I know. Well, I guarantee if you go back there today, it’s still empty and still, it’s probably still empty and there’s still chain link around it.

David Raubach: Yeah, I guarantee.

Hadley Ford: You know, and I was such a, it’s going to sound strange for, you know, Wall Street guy saying this, but you know, I was just kind of a naive babe in the woods, thinking like everyone’s focused on doing the right thing for the patient, but yeah, it’s exceptionally political. We had a situation in Jersey, this one’s even more bizarre. So, you know, John Henderson, who’s, you know, was our COO, he basically is a, you know, kind of a building and real estate expert par excellence, and we’re trying to get permits in New Jersey to build our center there. And we can’t get the permits, and like like months and months and months and months. I’m like, John, like what the heck? He’s like, I don’t know. We keep going to this one committee and they keep shooting us down. I’m like, God, I can’t believe it, yeah.

Hadley Ford: And I kid you not, I lived in New York at the time, and I used to get three papers every morning. The Times, the Journal, and of course the paper record, the New York Post.

David Raubach: And right, the only one of which in today day and age, I still get the Post. I get that online. I don’t get the Journal or Times anymore.

Hadley Ford: I still get the Post. And I got my coffee. I got the three papers. I open the door. I’m going back to the kitchen table. And there, the front page of the post is a guy in New Jersey in handcuffs being arrested for having taken bribes to approve projects. He was the chair of the committee we could never get.

David Raubach: Oh my gosh.

Hadley Ford: And not only that, you can go back and look this up. He was also accused of, and ultimately found guilty of, trading in body parts. Like he had this

David Raubach: Oh my gosh.

Hadley Ford: He had this black market thing where he was dealing, like, buying like kidneys and livers and things like that.

David Raubach: Oh my gosh.

Hadley Ford: And then selling them on the black market. It’s a really bad guy. He’d been the guy. And we didn’t know, again, too naive babe in the woods. You needed to grease that guy’s palm to get through. You needed to bribe him with some body bribe him needed. Fortunately the good authorities in New Jersey cleaned that up, and literally, like the next week, we got approval on building.

David Raubach: Well, they talk, you know, there’s the old adage, like, you know, I’d give a kidney to get this project done, get this deal done, whatever. Like, literally, you have to give a kidney.

Hadley Ford: Believe me, I would, had I known, if had I would have just delivered it in a little ice box, to me, we would approve months earlier.

David Raubach: Oh my gosh. So, in Oklahoma, I guess you didn’t have the same permitting issues in Oklahoma.

Hadley Ford: No, Oklahoma. I look, it’s, you know, give a little booster for Oklahoma City.

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: I grew up, I was born in North Carolina, and I lived in Florida for a while, but pretty much grew up in the Northeast. And yeah, I never knew anything about Oklahoma. It’s just like something off the map. So, you know, I had these preconceived notions of what Oklahoma was going to be like. But it was like, I mean, I would live there if I had a way to make a living there. I mean, yeah, I was just blown away. It was like the nicest people.

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: Like the greatest city, you know? There was like a whole refurbishment going on downtown at the time. It was like one cool restaurant, one cool club after another. It was so easy to do business. Everyone would take a meeting. They’d hear you out. It was great. I mean, it was, I recommend anyone trying to do business to go do it in Oklahoma City in particular. I just fell in love with the city, the people, and the project was fantastic. I mean, it all came together. And I don’t know that it could have come together that well any place else. So, it was really like the base that created the entire company for what we did in Chicago, Seattle, New Jersey.

Hadley Ford: You know, it just was that easy. Like, if all that crap had happened in Chicago first, you know, I’m not sure we would have, you know, made it through or gone on. But you know, we’d had that success in Oklahoma City, so we know we could make it work. And it gave us a lot of confidence, and it was just a great place to start.

David Raubach: So two things I want to point out because I do think that these had a big impact on the proton industry. One, you guys got the project done in Oklahoma City in about 24 months, which was unheard of at the time.

Hadley Ford: I mean, like, I think we got it done for under $100 million too.

David Raubach: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that compares to like three years and 200 and something million for the last project that got done.

Hadley Ford: And that’s what

David Raubach: Right. And that’s if you were to ask at the time, that’s what people would have said, these are $200 million projects, it’s going to take three plus years, right?

Hadley Ford: Yep.

David Raubach: So there’s the cost, there’s the time to get the project done, but it was also the first community proton center. So the previous five were all academic affiliated or part of academic institutions. So this was the first time that you proved out this concept or model of bringing proton therapy into the community setting.

Hadley Ford: Yeah. And in the US 80% of cancer patients are treated at community cancer centers. Those are all the stats we looked at when we came up with the plan. People know the big academic centers, and it’s great, and they do a lot of the research and they’re very innovative, but most patients actually are treated at these community centers. So, if you want to create access for patients, which was your vision and Dr. Cameron’s vision, then you’ve got to go into this community setting.

David Raubach: Yeah. So, what was, I mean, what was kind of the emotions for you? I guess first at groundbreaking, because that’s a big milestone, like shovel in the ground.

Hadley Ford: Yeah.

David Raubach: And then the first day when that first treatment gets delivered.

Hadley Ford: Wow. It was very emotional. I mean, I’ve done a lot of things in my career. There’s nothing that’s more fulfilling than what I did with Procure. I mean, it really is tremendous. And you know, there’s a lot of people working in healthcare will say that, but until you do it yourself, you know, I don’t think it really resonates. But to actually do something that changes the game and gives access to a tremendous technology to people in a local community, to physicians who never thought they’d have access to it, to patients who never thought they’d, you know, be in, that have the ability to be treated that way, it is a very emotional piece.

Hadley Ford: And I remember, and you know, it’s, you mentioned a lot of things, this is a very complex business plan. I still get questions today like, what the hell were you thinking? You know, that you’re going to, you know, reduce the cost by more than 50%, you know, reduce the time by, you know, over a year, work with local physicians and local hospitals. And we also set up, I don’t think this is widely as well known, you knew it, but you know we set up a research component as well.

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: Because we wanted to make sure that not only were you using the treatment, but you were, you know, getting the appropriate research and doing, you know, the right protocols and whatnot. And there just wasn’t a lot of research outside the academic setting for that, and there weren’t a lot of proton therapy centers with a lot of volume doing that. So we knew we were going to be higher volume, we’re going to be community settings, and we tried to involve, it actually did involve, the academic centers as much as we could in that research component.

Hadley Ford: So there was a lot of moving pieces, a very complex business plan, and you know, when it finally comes to fruition, it’s almost like a little bit of a miracle. And I remember the piece of land where the center is now, that was nothing. I mean, it was, I think it might still, was a bronze ice cream store that was like, it’s like you’re driving through nothing and there’s like this bronze for like no particular reason in the middle of nowhere. And we got the, like, a big chunk of land right next to that. And I remember walking out, and Hendo had told me exactly where it was.

Hadley Ford: He goes, “Go check out the land and see if you like it.” Like land’s land. Like is there a door nearby? That was another thing. We had to actually pay for a new substation because, you know, the proton cyclotron uses as much power as a small town.

Hadley Ford: But I parked in the Bronze parking lot and I just walked out into that field. And I remember it was hot. I remember standing in that field and just crying, just like I’d been touched by God or something. And knew that Dr. Cameron’s vision and my vision were going to be achieved, and that we were going to build a state-of-the-art proton therapy center in a community setting, be combined with a state-of-the-art cancer center, and, you know, hopefully help reinvent how cancer got treated. And that’s ultimately what happened. But I remember that.

Hadley Ford: And the first patient treatment was, you know, sort of even more so. I mean, that part of getting it all set up is complex, but you know, the actual building of a proton therapy center, and I got to give, you know, full kudos to Hendo on this, man, we laid out a very aggressive calendar, a very aggressive budget, and we came in favorable to both. I mean, on our first project, you know, it’s just stunning accomplishment. And then when our first patient got treated, I mean, you almost can’t believe it. I mean, it’s even today, as I sit here today, and I know, you know, there’s four sort of proton therapy centers that we developed, and you know, god knows how many else, you know, kind of are out there, based on the staff that sort of went out and propagated, guys like yourself went out and worked for other places to make them successful.

Hadley Ford: That’s a pretty cool place to be. And I still don’t exactly know how we did it. I was there. I did it. I negotiated all these things. I ran all these things. Dr. Cameron laid it out. Nick did his bit. Hendo did his bit. You know, we, and the nice thing was, you know, we all got along famously, and you know, we had a great partnership amongst each other, and you know, I think the culture was pretty strong, and yeah, you know, you’re doing good and doing well by doing good, and it was good times.

David Raubach: So, I do want to, you mentioned the registry.

Hadley Ford: So, it’s interesting that you bring that up.

David Raubach: We just had a call last week with the director of the New York Proton Center, which is affiliated with Memorial Sloan Kettering.

Hadley Ford: Yeah.

David Raubach: And we were going, he was looking at the registry trial data that we have compiled here in Oklahoma. So, from day one we were trying, we were putting 90 plus% of patients on this registry trial.

Hadley Ford: Yeah.

David Raubach: And he made the comment on this call, he said he was blown away at the number of patients and the extent of the data and the depth of the data and the quality of the data. And he said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” He said, “There’s no other center in the country right now that has this collection of registry data.”

Hadley Ford: Yeah, and so he and his team at Memorial Sloan Kettering are really excited to help us put together a paper, and we’re going to look at 10 plus year followup. So patients that were treated over 10 years ago, and just how they’re doing, and it should look really good just based on kind of an initial assessment. And there’s, I don’t know, I mean, we have over 5,000 patients on the registry trial in Oklahoma, and I don’t know how many centers are part of PCG now, but I bet it’s over 30 centers that are part of PCG. So, it is the go-to resource for proton therapy research and proton therapy data.

David Raubach: That was the vision.

Hadley Ford: That was

David Raubach: It’s amazing, so yeah. So that’s, in terms of like just impact in the industry, that’s that is kind of, we don’t think about that. You see the building.

Hadley Ford: That’s good to hear. That’s, it’s still going strong.

David Raubach: So another thing still going strong, and so I want to get you to talk about this, you remember the patient graduation lunches.

Hadley Ford: Yeah, sure.

David Raubach: So just talk about like going to those and what that was like, as those were getting set up, and just the experience of going, you’re sort of leading the witness here because you know the story I’m going to tell.

Hadley Ford: Yeah. So fair. Yeah. One of the things that I think it was originally might have been Hendo’s idea, might have been Nick’s idea, I can’t remember whose idea it was, but you know, we thought, you know, it is a tight community and we really want to build awareness and we want to build community amongst the people who have had the treatment. So we had these patient lunches, and we had challenge coins that were given to people who graduated from treatment. And the patient lunches were twofold. One was a celebration of people who had finished their treatment, but it was also an educational component for people who were in treatment, or even people who were considering getting treatment, to come and meet existing patients who graduated and whatnot.

Hadley Ford: And it was just a great event. And I used to go around, and I’m a big believer in, sort of, being on the ground, not just sitting in some office somewhere. So, I would go from center to center. And I work very well remotely. And I probably, you know, at the time, you know, maybe we had two centers open, couple under construction. So, you know, I’d be traveling around the country, and I came into Oklahoma City, and anytime I’d come to Oklahoma City, I’d say, you know, if there’s a luncheon, yeah, I’d like to say a few words. So I happened to be in town and they had a luncheon going on. And they said, “Oh, Hadley, you’re going to speak right after this young patient from Holland who’s going to talk.” And I said, “Okay, that’s fine.”

Hadley Ford: And I always get emotional just thinking about this, because it sort of encapsulates the entire sort of reason that you do something entrepreneurial, and do something entrepreneurial in healthcare, and the whole vision that Dr. Jay had and that he got me to buy into. And this young woman got up, and she was maybe 10, 11 years old, I can’t remember how old she was, but young, and from Holland, and she actually spoke English very well, probably better than I do. And she stood up and she said, you know, my name is, and she said, I had this terrible diagnosis where a tumor was, you know, wrapped around my spine. And all the local doctors in Holland said that, some of them said it was inoperable, some said that they could operate but I’d never walk again.

Hadley Ford: And my mother did some research, and she found out about the proton therapy center in Oklahoma City and the program they had for kids, and also what we put in place, because remember the first thing on our business plan with Dr. Jay and myself was kids get treatment. We put together a charitable piece. We couldn’t pay for the health care component of it, that wasn’t allowed by regulations, which always struck me as odd, but be it as it may, we covered all the other expenses. So travel, hotel, food, whatnot, for kids and their families who needed to undergo treatment. And you know, this was, I think it was a little bit of a visionary piece that we had as well, because you know, you could be there for a month, 45 days, but we would cover all those expenses or help defray them to whatever amount the family needed.

Hadley Ford: So her mom had researched all this and had discovered the Oklahoma City Proton Therapy Center, and the two of them flew to Oklahoma City, and she got treatment. And she came into the center, and we treated the tumor with proton therapy and did exactly what proton therapy does, which is destroy the tumor without affecting the surrounding tissue. And this little girl stood up there and she said, “The doctors told me I would never walk again.” And she put the microphone down and she skipped down to hug her mother. And I could barely talk. I stood up and I took the microphone. I said, “I got nothing else to say.”

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: That was that. But you know, you see something like that, and you know, you know, you’ve done the right thing. You know, you often wonder, what can I do with my life? What do I want to do every day when I get out of bed? And that got answered for me in that one moment. And I can die a happy man knowing I saved one little girl’s life for her.

David Raubach: Yeah, that’s amazing.

Hadley Ford: You, not me personally, but the team as a whole.

David Raubach: But being a part of that team, it is amazing, and you were a part of that team. I mean, you were there, and, you know, it does take great people to do it, and we did have a great team, and, you know, it was good, good time, good center.

David Raubach: So on the foundation note, and I’m glad you brought that up, because another one of the legacies that procure created was having this concept of a foundation, because with proton centers you get a lot of patients that travel. They’re unique, limited resources. We were having families come over from international destinations, and so we still have a foundation that’s modeled after the procure. What was, was it the procure, what did we call that foundation?

Hadley Ford: Oh, I… something foundation. I don’t know. Procure cares or something like that.

David Raubach: Yeah. Well, we have a foundation called the Proton Pals Foundation here locally, and it was actually started by a couple of former patients and then the grandmom of a pediatric patient, and they started it about 10 years ago with the purpose of helping patients with cost of travel.

Hadley Ford: That’s fantastic.

David Raubach: Well, that we did something unique a few weeks ago. We had a pediatric patient that was treated here for a very aggressive brain tumor when he was about two years old, or actually less than two years old. He had less than a 50% chance of even surviving to his seventh birthday. So five year survival. He got proton therapy, and he just graduated high school in May. And the Proton Pals Foundation presented him with a scholarship to go to college.

Hadley Ford: Oh, that is very cool. And I will say I’m tearing up thinking about it because it, like, we were looking at pictures of him when he was up here as a 2-year-old.

David Raubach: And then he had not been back to the facility, so he didn’t even remember necessarily what the facility was like, and his parents hadn’t been back in, basically, 17 years. I think he was treated in 2000, right after we opened, or 16 years, because it was 2010.

Hadley Ford: Wow.

David Raubach: And so they walked in, and they’re walking through the facility, and they’re reminiscing, and we had some of the pediatric team that’s since retired from when he was getting treated come back, and we had a little reunion. But it was just really, I don’t know, it was cool to see kind of that come full circle with both the foundational element and the pediatric element.

Hadley Ford: That is very cool. That is it. But those are all the pieces, you know, that I got to give Dr. Jake credit for the vision, and Nick credit for the vision, and, you know, we wanted to make sure that it was a full community setting, that people had access to the technology, and that, you know, it’s an old saw, you know, from going to school, you can’t manage if you don’t measure, and that’s why we set up the research piece. And you know, you got to give access, unfortunately money is a big part of the access, and I’m sure you’re still dealing with all the, you know, the David Spade insurance things.

David Raubach: No, no, no, no. So, you know, it’s, we had, you know, another piece that we set up at Proare, what I call the insurance warriors,

Hadley Ford: Yeah.

David Raubach: the group that we had up there in the second floor, and I’d go sit with them. I’d make outbound calls myself to the insurance companies, understand what the problems were. So, you know, we want to take care of research, we want to take care of expenses, we want to take care of insurance. We wanted to make this as simple as, you know, I unfortunately have a tumor, the best technology to treat it is proton therapy, and just make access to it, payment for it, just take all the worry out of it, and make sure that you know that you’re getting something that’s good. And that’s the research component of it.

Hadley Ford: You know, you don’t want to use limited slots that you have in a proton therapy center for something that’s, you know, just going to make you a buck. You want to make it most impactful. So you need the research component of that, but then people need to have access to it, their insurance company needs to pay for it. And you know, if you got to stay in a hotel, you got to be able to pay for that. So we tried to make it a holistic piece around all those components. And that was the original mindset in working with a hospital partner, on the other attendant cancer services, is you’re going to need more than just, you know, the proton therapy as part of your treatment, and just make sure that was as easy and accessible as possible.

Hadley Ford: So you know that was the overall vision, and I think we got pretty close to it, and it’s good to hear a lot of those pieces are still carrying on.

David Raubach: So, do you recall a conversation, because I think I remember having some interactions with you early on where you expressed surprise at the way that the insurance companies were approaching coverage. I think you know there’s, you learn about the CON process and how that’s oftentimes this big collusion, and then you run into insurance companies. So, what do you remember about some of those conversations and just how shocking maybe it was?

Hadley Ford: I remember one, I won’t name the insurance company, but one of the big health care coverage companies, their medical director, the actual big dog medical director, came down, actually, I mean, we were pounding, and he actually came down to the center, or maybe I had the meeting in his office, I can’t remember. Anyway, either I was at his office or he came down to the center, and my memory is it was in that conference room on the second floor there that over the lobby.

Hadley Ford: And he said to me, you know, Hadley, this is, you know, no recording, nothing on the record. He goes, yeah, it’s just sort of off the record. You know, I’m going to tell you a couple of facts and how the insurance company, and we’re not alone in thinking about it this way, thinks about cancer care. And he said, you know, cancer skews older, right? You know, I think we can all agree if kids get cancer, you got to pay for, you got to get them treatment. He said, but you know, cancer skews older, and at some point people are going to age out into Medicare. And he said, you know, so our strategy, and you know, I’ll even stipulate that proton therapy is better than photon.

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: But you know, our strategy is to say no and age as many into Medicare as we can so we don’t have to cover it. And yeah, to this day, my jaw is on the floor. I mean, right, I had a strong enough personal relationship with him that I appreciated the candor, but at the same time, I wish he had just stopped after saying, “Let’s stipulate proton therapy is better.”

David Raubach: Right. Right.

Hadley Ford: And not got into the business model aspect of it. But you did get those issues, you know, and unfortunately people are driven by economics, you know, rather than the right thing to do. The other part was the physician part. You know, it’s, you’d run into these guys who had the in-office exception with photon equipment, and they made a lot of money in photon therapy, and they would not even consider, you know, sort of sending their patients to a proton therapy center, even if it was better technology.

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: And I remember a conversation with a physician in New Jersey ahead of a big group, and I said, “Yeah, why don’t we, little partner, we’ll give you some expedited access to the proton therapy center here.” He said, you know, “I just make more money on proton therapy,” and literally the word he said, “I have a mortgage to pay and my kid has braces.”

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: I mean, it’s an unfortunate fact, and the economic piece drives a lot of these decisions, which is another reason why we really wanted to do the research piece, because our mindset was it’s a long game. And you got to have excellent research, and you got to have those longitudinal studies that show not just that you have better short-term results, but that you have better long-term results, because, you know, one of the big impacts of, you know, going down the photon route is, and photons, you know, look, if you can’t get protons, you know, some of the more sophisticated photon solutions are going to be just fine. But you know, you do get all that excess of radiation, and there is a chance of secondary tumors and recurrence and all this sort of stuff, and you can only show that through time.

Hadley Ford: You know, I can make all the arguments I want from science day one, but unless you do the research and do, you know, kind of the gold standard research, you’re not going to be able to prove it. So that’s why we did that. We had a longer term view. Hopefully the studies you’re doing now in conjunction with MSK are going to sort of prove out that, you know, protons are a very viable alternative for a lot of different cancer sites.

David Raubach: Yeah, there was a study that MD Anderson just published, and it was a randomized trial. So they actually did a blinded randomized trial, which is really hard to do when you’re talking with patients about something that delivers more radiation to healthy tissue versus less radiation.

Hadley Ford: They managed. Which arm would you like to be in?

David Raubach: Yeah.

Hadley Ford: Yeah. Exactly.

David Raubach: Right. Yeah. Do you want to be in the arm where you jump out of the plane with the parachute or without the parachute?

Hadley Ford: Because we got to prove the parachute. We got to prove both.

David Raubach: Yeah. And so they showed a significant decrease in the incidence rate of feeding tubes for these head and neck cancer patients. But what they also showed was a statistically significant increase in overall survival.

Hadley Ford: Oh wow.

David Raubach: So, not just disease-free survival or risk of secondary malignancies, literally the patients lived longer on the proton arm versus the photon arm. And the theory is that it was just the side effects were so toxic.

Hadley Ford: Yep.

David Raubach: For some patients on the photon arm for head.

Hadley Ford: I’m glad that’s being proven out. I mean, we always used to think that, and you know, I think the early indicators were that, that was true, and sort of the anecdotal evidence you had over, you know, kind of the proton therapy been done in the previous decades was that, but you know, to actually have it in a RCT, that’s pretty damn good.

David Raubach: So talk, just to kind of close things out, just as you look back big picture, how do you think about your time with Procure, and just that whole kind of storyline or story arc of your life that you participated in for many years?

Hadley Ford: I feel blessed that I got that phone call from Kevin Cameron. You know, I think I can die knowing that, you know, the team and I made a tremendous difference in a lot of people’s lives. And you know, I’m pretty proud of that, and I just very blessed that I was given that opportunity, and blessed that I was able to be successful at it, and blessed that, you know, there’s four proton therapy centers that Dr. Cameron and I had a hand in, and that they’re treating patients today and, you know, changing people’s lives. It’s pretty unique, and I still run into random people.

Hadley Ford: I was in a restaurant, and some woman stopped by the table, and she was a friend of someone at the table, and she sat down, and somehow it came up that she’d gotten proton therapy at the center in New Jersey.

David Raubach: Wow.

Hadley Ford: Had changed her life. And actually, random occurrence, the first patient I got treated at the Jersey Center, the absolute first patient, was an old friend of my father’s, randomly.

David Raubach: Wow.

Hadley Ford: Just, he called my father up, he said, “I saw your name on the wall at this pro. Are you doing?” He said, “No, it’s my son.” I mean, it’s, yeah, it just, these random impacts of people’s lives that has changed and impacted and made, you know, changed their lives, made their lives better, made their family’s lives better. I mean, I just feel blessed that happened to me. You can’t imagine something like that happening in your life where you actually make an impact like that. And it’s, I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.

David Raubach: Well, we still do the graduation ceremony. I mean, that was obviously it was a little bit of a leading question, I knew the story you were going to tell. But we still do the graduation luncheon, and we’re, we still do the coin. It’s the exact same coin. And we’re at 6,700, I think, graduates here.

Hadley Ford: So, if all four of the centers are open, I mean, the four ProCure centers have to be over 15,000 collective patients at this point that have been treated, which is, it really is amazing.

David Raubach: And we have, our first podcast episode with this podcast that we created a year ago was actually with a pediatric patient who came from England to get treated here in Oklahoma, and they came back. He was about one when he got treated here, and they came back and he was about 10 years old. And so they wanted, for them it was closure.

Hadley Ford: Yeah.

David Raubach: It was the final closure of going back to the facility that had saved his life, and he, of course, again didn’t have any memory of it. Parents hadn’t been back. And that was, that was podcast number one that we did with this, was pediatric patient that we treated here.

Hadley Ford: I’m glad to see that heritage continue. Kids first. That’s, you know, it makes a massive difference with kids especially, you know, you’re going to show this longitudinal study that, you know, kind of extension of life. I mean, that’s where it matters with kids. I mean, because, you know, you get treated with one, you got 80 years. You don’t want a lot of poison in your body when you’re one. I don’t really care if I have a lot of poison in my body when I’m 80. I can fake it to the finish line no matter what. But when you’re one, I mean, it makes a massive difference. So, I’m glad to see that that’s continuing.

Hadley Ford: And thanks to you for, you know, keeping the Oklahoma City Center going. That’s, you know, kudos to you, and it couldn’t be a better guy who made that work. So, congrats on that.

David Raubach: Well, I appreciate that, Hadley. And we treated 793 patients last year, and we are up, we’re on pace to do over 800 this year. So, the center’s as busy as it’s ever been.

Hadley Ford: You still use the old KPIs you developed back in the day?

David Raubach: We do. Yeah, we still use the, the IMS system. That’s how we still do all our reporting. There’s still a big David table in there.

Hadley Ford: Oh my god. God, when we made that, you know, your viewers should know that you were an inventor of many of the factors of efficiency and treatment that we followed and kept track of to improve the process.

David Raubach: So yeah, it’s pretty cool logging into that software, and now I have other people, now I have analysts that work for me.

Hadley Ford: Yeah. I’m not the analyst.

David Raubach: Yeah. No, believe me, you definitely need that. I was glad you were there and I didn’t have to do it.

Hadley Ford: And I’m sure you’re glad you don’t have to do it, but a necessary component of delivering excellent care.

David Raubach: Well, we’re, so this center is so old, Hadley, and I guess this’ll tell you how old we are now, we’re actually already talking about what’s next.

Hadley Ford: Oh my goodness.

David Raubach: I mean, at some point the system ends of life or hits end of life. And so, well, you remember when we had the cyclotron, we had to replace it.

Hadley Ford: Yeah. The end of life turned out to be a year and a half.

David Raubach: Yeah. So fortunately our cyclotron’s a little bit newer than the rest of the system, but yeah, we’re already having to figure out what to do, and we’re working with IBA on that.

Hadley Ford: So well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on, Hadley. I really appreciate it.

David Raubach: My pleasure, David. Anytime, anything you ever need, you just, you know, pick up the phone and call me. I’ll be there.

Hadley Ford: Well, I’m going to come up with a new business idea for you to come to Oklahoma to work on.

David Raubach: So I love it. Yeah. And free is good. It’s good. I like free. I like free.

Hadley Ford: God rest his soul. He’s a great man. Dr. Jay.

David Raubach: Yes, sir. Well, thank you, Hadley.

Hadley Ford: You’re very welcome, David. Thank you. Have a good rest of your week.

David Raubach: The Cancer Project podcast is made possible by the Oklahoma Proton Center, a state-of-the-art cancer center where precision and treatment meets real compassion in care. We’re grateful for their support and for you for spending this time with us. If you’d like to learn more about the Oklahoma Proton Center, you can visit their website at the link below. And if something you heard today resonated, we’d love for you to stick with us. You can subscribe to the podcast and follow along on our socials linked below for more conversations like this. Honest stories, thoughtful perspectives, and the kind of support people don’t always know where to find, but do truly need.

David Raubach: At the end of the day, this podcast isn’t just about cancer. It’s about what it means to be human inside of it and how we keep living, connecting, and moving forward together. We hope you leave each episode feeling a little bit more informed, a little bit more supported, and a lot less alone.