“A tremendous step forward”: Franklin Medical Center’s Blake Kramer talks new Mary Bird Perkins partnership

Access to cancer care saves lives. Mary Bird Perkins Cancer and Franklin Medical Center recently announced a partnership to enhance cancer care in the Franklin Parish area, bringing much-needed cancer care services to those in need, close to home.

Blake Kramer is Franklin Medical Center’s administrator. A Winnsboro native, Kramer comes from a legal background, having studied at LSU’s Paul Hebert Law Center and practiced with Hammonds and Sills before joining Franklin Medical Center as its in-house legal counsel in 2006. He’s headed the Center since 2010.

Here, Kramer talks about the hospital, which has served Franklin Parish locals since 1970, and how the new partnership with Mary Bird Perkins will impact the wider area.

What are some key services Franklin Medical Center provides?

We try very hard to make sure that we can offer the rural populations around here services that they probably aren’t going to be able to easily get elsewhere. That means a collection of specialists like endocrinology, orthopedic surgery, general surgery and urology. It also means having a full range of lab diagnostics and imaging – such as x-ray/CT/MRI/nuclear medicine – to make sure that all of our doctors and mid-levels have the tools they need to do the best job possible.

What does the recently announced Mary Bird Perkins partnership mean for Franklin Medical Center?

This is a tremendous step forward for our community. In just a few years, we’ve gone from no such services here at all to a full-blown chemotherapy infusion center to a partnership with the premiere oncology provider in Louisiana. That is huge progress, and we are very excited about where it’s going to go next.

Franklin Medical Center has had a relationship with Dr. Manish Dhawan for some time. How has that relationship contributed to the formal partnership between Mary Bird Perkins and Franklin Medical Center?

I don’t know if we could have done something like this without Dr. Dhawan.

When we started this program, this was a new thing for us, so he did a great job bringing us along to what was most important and most needed for our patients. Having had several years to build up the range of services around his oncology practice made it much easier to launch into a relationship with an organization like Mary Bird Perkins.

What are some of your goals for the future of Franklin Medical Center?

Overall, our current vision going forward is to continue expanding and refining our services in an effort to provide the most high-quality, comprehensive care possible to the people of rural northeast Louisiana. Specifically, we just matched our first two family medicine residents, which should make for a reliable pipeline of primary care physicians to the entire region for the foreseeable future.

For more information about the new partnership between Franklin Medical Center and Mary Bird Perkins, please visit our website here: (link to come)