Superior and compassionate breast care with cutting edge technology

Huggins Hospital: A Small Community Hospital with a Big Heart

As the only community hospital within the many miles surrounding Wolfeboro, N.H., the staff at Huggins feels a strong commitment to provide their community with the latest and greatest technology.

Perhaps more than anywhere else, this commitment is reflected in their breast health program. Huggins has been a Softer Mammogram ProviderSM for nearly three years, and they just recently swapped their analog equipment for a Hologic Selenia system. In addition to the many outreach programs they offer to the community, this new combination of digital plus MammoPad has proven to be a successful business move for the hospital. In the past three years, Huggins’ daily patient volume has risen more than 200%. And according to Carol Lefoley, the hospital’s VP of Ancillary Services, this is only the beginning.

Comfort and Convenience

Lefoley says the decision to adopt the MammoPad® breast cushion was a “no-brainer”.

“We wanted to provide a more comfortable experience for our patients, as well as continue our commitment to provide state-of-the-art technology to the community,” she says. “As soon as we saw [MammoPad], I knew we had to have it.”

Within the first few months of adopting the cushion, Lefoley found the perfect way to spread the word about the availability of a softer mammogram to the women of Wolfeboro. Overdue for her own mammogram by more than a year and half because of her busy work schedule, Lefoley wanted to find a way to reach out to working women and make scheduling their mammogram “as easy as scheduling a hair appointment.” So began Huggins Hospital’s “Soft Touch Saturdays,” in which the hospital offered extended evening hours and one Saturday a month to schedule a mammogram.

Funded by a grant from the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the Soft Touch Saturdays emphasized “convenience, comfort and knowledge,” according to Louise Saxby, the lead mammographer at Huggins.

And for the hospital, marketing the Soft Touch Saturdays program provided the perfect opportunity to spread the word about MammoPad. They reached out to the community through newspaper and radio ads, and targeted promotional materials to places often frequented by women, like local hair salons and Curves workout facilities.

The response to the Soft Touch Saturdays was overwhelmingly positive. Surveys given to patients on those Saturdays revealed that almost every woman appreciated the convenience of the weekend appointments, as well as the comfort they experienced with MammoPad. Even when Huggins did not receive another Komen grant in the second year to continue the program, they decided to fund it themselves based on the success from the first year.