Imagine practicing oncology in a setting where you're not merely another provider in an overwhelming institutional bureaucracy, but rather a valued partner in a nationally recognized cancer program that combines the intimacy and autonomy of community practice with the academic rigor and clinical trial access of an NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. At Celilo Cancer Center, part of Adventist Health Columbia Gorge in collaboration with OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, you'll discover what physician satisfaction actually looks like: clinical independence supported by world-class resources, colleagues who genuinely collaborate rather than compete, and patients who choose your care not because of limited options but because of your program's exceptional reputation throughout the Columbia River Gorge and beyond.
Adventist Health Columbia Gorge carries a remarkable 124-year legacy of serving The Dalles and surrounding communities, beginning in 1901 when pioneer physicians Dr. Belle Cooper Rinehart and Dr. Mary Powell Johnson established a hospital in the Rinehart family home. Dr. Rinehart's story itself reflects the pioneering spirit that continues to define this institution—a widow and mother of four who graduated from medical school in 1897 and established her practice in what was then frontier Oregon, expanding her home to create the region's first hospital.
Through more than a century of growth and evolution, the institution has consistently remained ahead of national trends in healthcare delivery. In June 1992, the facility became the first hospital in the world to implement the Planetree concept of patient-centered care facility-wide—not as a marketing slogan but as a fundamental transformation involving near-complete architectural renovation, comprehensive staff training, and systemic changes designed to "personalize, humanize and demystify" the hospital experience. In 2007, the hospital earned recognition as a "Designated Patient-Centered Hospital," one of only five such facilities in the entire country. This pioneering commitment to whole-person care creates the clinical environment where you'll practice—where patient satisfaction isn't measured merely through surveys but through genuine healing relationships that honor the complexity of human experience beyond disease states.
On June 1, 2023, Mid-Columbia Medical Center joined Adventist Health, becoming Adventist Health Columbia Gorge and gaining access to the resources, expertise, and stability of one of the West Coast's most respected faith-based healthcare systems while maintaining the community focus and clinical autonomy that define excellent rural healthcare. This transition represents not consolidation for efficiency but strategic partnership for enhanced capability—bringing together the best of community-based care with the infrastructure support that allows physicians to focus on medicine rather than administrative burden.
Adventist Health Columbia Gorge operates as a comprehensive community medical center offering the full spectrum of acute and specialty care services. Beyond Celilo Cancer Center, the facility provides cardiology, orthopedics, family and internal medicine, surgery, urology, ophthalmology, emergency services, sleep medicine, a women's center including a birthing center, occupational health, OB/GYN services, integrated therapies, physical therapy, and hospitalist programs. This breadth ensures that your cancer patients receive coordinated, comprehensive care without navigating fragmented systems across multiple unrelated facilities.
The hospital has earned an impressive array of quality recognitions that reflect genuine clinical excellence rather than purchased marketing designations. The Joint Commission's Gold Seal of Approval for Hospital Accreditation, Home Health Accreditation, and Laboratory Accreditation demonstrates continuous compliance with rigorous performance standards. The facility holds multiple American College of Radiology designations including certification as a Diagnostic Imaging Center of Excellence (DICOE) in mammography, stereotactic breast biopsy, breast ultrasound, and breast MRI. Most significantly, Adventist Health Columbia Gorge is the only ACR-designated lung cancer screening center in the Gorge, meeting elite standards for image quality, procedures, and comprehensive follow-up care including counseling and smoking cessation programs.
The Breast Center has maintained continuous accreditation since 2009 from the American College of Surgeons' National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers (NAPBC)—the only NAPBC-accredited breast center in the Columbia River Gorge. This designation ensures that patients receive comprehensive, multidisciplinary breast care without leaving their community, eliminating the access barriers and care fragmentation that rural patients typically face. Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Pediatric programs have earned five-star designations in Oregon's Patient-Centered Primary Care Home program, the highest available rating given only to institutions meeting the most rigorous standards for coordinated, patient-centered primary care.
Healthgrades has recognized the facility with America's 50 Best Hospitals for Outpatient Prostate Care Award, while patient satisfaction data shows 61% of patients actively recommending the hospital—a meaningful indicator of genuine satisfaction in an era when many facilities struggle to achieve even modest recommendation rates. These recognitions reflect not marketing positioning but the daily reality of clinical excellence and patient experience that defines your practice environment.
Adventist Health Wins 2025 Top Workplaces Industry Award, A National Recognition
For more than 20 years, Celilo Cancer Center has provided compassionate, patient-centered cancer care that supports body, mind, and spirit—translating the hospital's pioneering patient-centered philosophy into oncology practice. The center delivers comprehensive services in hematology oncology, radiation oncology, and surgical care, creating the multidisciplinary approach essential for optimal cancer outcomes while maintaining the accessibility and personal attention that defines community-based practice.
What distinguishes Celilo is the genuine integration of services that larger cancer centers claim but rarely achieve. Medical oncology, radiation oncology, and surgical oncology teams function not as siloed specialties defending territories but as collaborative partners unified around patient outcomes. Tumor boards bring together multiple specialties to review complex cases, ensuring that treatment plans reflect collective wisdom rather than individual preference. Navigation services guide patients through the complexity of cancer care, integrating with social work, counseling, and community resources to address the full spectrum of patient and family needs.
The center employs advanced technology including intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) that shapes radiation beams precisely to spare surrounding tissue, and for breast cancer patients, brachytherapy that dramatically shortens radiation therapy from a typical four weeks to only one week—a transformative difference for rural patients who might otherwise face crushing logistical and financial burdens from extended treatment courses requiring daily travel or temporary relocation. These aren't experimental technologies requiring patient risk tolerance but proven modalities delivered with the expertise and outcomes that define excellent cancer care.
Physical facilities support the healing environment essential for oncology patients navigating the physical and emotional demands of cancer treatment. The center's design reflects Planetree principles of patient-centered care with comfortable, homelike spaces that reduce institutional anxiety. Private infusion areas provide dignity and comfort during chemotherapy sessions. Support services including nutritional counseling, pain management, palliative care consultation, and integrative therapies address the full spectrum of patient needs beyond tumor biology.
In a transformative development for oncology in the Columbia River Gorge, Adventist Health Columbia Gorge formalized an agreement with Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Knight Cancer Institute to provide collaborative cancer care at Celilo Cancer Center. This partnership represents far more than an affiliation logo on marketing materials—it's a genuine operational integration that brings the resources, expertise, and clinical trial access of an NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center directly into community practice.
Under this agreement, Celilo Cancer Center is governed by a board jointly representing OHSU Knight Cancer Institute and Adventist Health Columbia Gorge, ensuring that clinical decisions reflect both academic excellence and community needs. The Knight Cancer Institute provides medical oncology and infusion services, while Adventist Health delivers radiation oncology and comprehensive support services, creating an integrated program that offers patients the full continuum of cancer care without requiring travel to Portland for routine treatment.
The OHSU Knight Cancer Institute is the only NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center between Sacramento and Seattle—a distinction reflecting exceptional research, clinical care, and community engagement rather than mere institutional prestige. The institute pioneered the field of precision oncology through the groundbreaking work of CEO Brian Druker, MD, who developed targeted therapy approaches that transformed cancer treatment worldwide. The Knight Cancer Institute serves as headquarters for the Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG) Cancer Research Network, designing and conducting clinical trials that establish new treatments, prevention strategies, and ways to support cancer survivors.
For you as an oncology physician, this partnership creates opportunities that simply don't exist in typical community oncology practice. Access to OHSU clinical trials means your patients can receive cutting-edge therapies years before FDA approval without traveling to academic medical centers for every treatment cycle. Consultation with OHSU specialists provides second opinions and complex case support when you need it, without the defensive territoriality that often characterizes academic-community relationships. Continuing medical education through OHSU faculty development programs keeps you current with emerging therapies and treatment paradigms while earning credits through world-class faculty.
Most importantly, this partnership allows you to practice with the intellectual stimulation and evidence base of academic medicine while maintaining the autonomy, patient relationships, and work-life balance of community practice. You're not an academic faculty member grinding through administrative requirements and competing for research funding—you're a community oncologist with academic resources at your fingertips when you need them.
The leadership structure at Adventist Health Columbia Gorge reflects genuine commitment to physician autonomy, clinical excellence, and sustainable rural healthcare rather than corporate consolidation and cost reduction. Kyle King serves as President of Adventist Health's Oregon Service Area, overseeing the strategic direction of three hospitals including Adventist Health Portland, Adventist Health Tillamook, and Adventist Health Columbia Gorge. King brings nearly 15 years of healthcare leadership experience and deep understanding of Oregon healthcare markets, having joined Adventist Health in 2011 and progressively led clinic operations, market development, and hospital operations throughout the state.
King's leadership philosophy emphasizes service, collaboration, and genuine investment in people rather than institutional power structures. His work developing partnerships with Oregon Health & Science University demonstrates commitment to innovative collaboration that enhances patient care rather than protecting organizational turf. Under his oversight, the Oregon Service Area has earned recognition from Forbes as one of Oregon's top employers with over 500 employees, ranking fourth overall and first among healthcare organizations in the state—a distinction based on employee surveys rather than purchased marketing awards, reflecting genuine workplace satisfaction.
At the hospital level, Jayme Thompson recently assumed leadership as Administrator of Adventist Health Columbia Gorge in November 2024, bringing extensive clinical expertise and dedication to fostering cultures of collaboration, safety, and quality. Thompson's nursing background and operational leadership experience position her to understand physician needs and support clinical excellence while navigating the administrative complexities of rural hospital management. King describes Thompson as "passionate about building successful teams that promote a collaborative environment with both internal staff and external community partners"—precisely the leadership approach that allows physicians to focus on patient care rather than organizational politics.
This leadership structure ensures that physician concerns reach decision-makers who understand clinical realities and value physician input rather than viewing clinicians as interchangeable production units. You'll work with leaders who recognize that excellent patient care requires supporting the physicians who deliver it, creating practice environments where clinical excellence and physician satisfaction reinforce rather than contradict each other.
Adventist Health Columbia Gorge operates within a larger health system that provides stability, resources, and expertise while respecting local autonomy and community identity. Adventist Health is a faith-based, nonprofit integrated health system serving more than 90 communities across the West Coast and Hawaii with over 440 sites of care including 26 acute care hospitals, more than 400 outpatient clinics, home care and hospice agencies, and joint-venture retirement centers. The system employs approximately 37,000 associates including physicians, nurses, and support staff unified by a mission to live God's love by inspiring health, wholeness and hope.
This scale provides advantages that independent community hospitals increasingly struggle to maintain: sophisticated revenue cycle management ensuring appropriate reimbursement without burdening physicians with documentation requirements; robust compliance infrastructure managing regulatory complexity; access to capital for facility improvements and technology upgrades; clinical best practices development and sharing across facilities; and purchasing power reducing costs for medications, supplies, and equipment. You benefit from these economies of scale without sacrificing the community identity and clinical autonomy that make rural practice rewarding.
The faith-based mission creates organizational culture distinct from investor-owned or even many secular nonprofit systems. Decisions prioritize patient care and community health over shareholder returns or executive compensation. The explicit values framework emphasizing service, compassion, and human dignity translates to workplace culture that respects employees and physicians as whole persons rather than merely production inputs. In an era when many healthcare systems increasingly resemble financial engineering operations, Adventist Health's mission-driven approach provides refreshing clarity about organizational purpose.
Importantly for physicians considering relocation, Oregon's approval of the Adventist Health acquisition included conditions ensuring that the hospital "will continue operating substantially all of its facilities, services, and programs" and that Adventist would impose "no religious-based restrictions on medical procedures or services, including abortion, fertility services, birth control, sterilization, family planning counseling, gender-affirming services, and end-of-life services." This ensures that while you practice within a faith-based organization that provides mission clarity and values alignment, you maintain full clinical autonomy to provide evidence-based care according to medical standards rather than religious doctrine.
The opportunity at Celilo Cancer Center represents something increasingly rare in American oncology: the chance to practice comprehensive cancer care with genuine autonomy, intellectual stimulation through academic partnerships, and human-scale relationships with patients and colleagues—all in a community where your $315,000 salary provides financial security and lifestyle quality that would require $450,000+ in metropolitan markets to achieve equivalent purchasing power and quality of life.
You'll practice in facilities designed for healing rather than throughput optimization, supported by colleagues who collaborate because the patient census makes hoarding volume absurd, connected to OHSU academic resources when complex cases require consultation, with access to clinical trials that keep your practice intellectually stimulating and your patients' options maximized. Your tumor board discussions involve colleagues you know personally who respect your clinical judgment rather than territorial specialists defending departmental empires. Your patients choose you not because managed care panels limit options but because Celilo's reputation throughout the Gorge attracts patients who could go elsewhere.
The practice environment at Celilo reflects what drew many physicians to oncology before administrative burden and production pressure crushed the joy from cancer care. You'll have time to know patients as people navigating life-threatening illness rather than merely pathology specimens requiring protocol adherence. You'll practice medicine informed by evidence but guided by wisdom, supported by technology but centered on relationship. You'll experience the professional satisfaction that comes from delivering excellent care in an environment designed to make excellence achievable rather than heroic.
This is community oncology as it should be: intellectually rigorous, clinically excellent, financially sustainable, and profoundly human. Welcome to Celilo Cancer Center, where your career in cancer care can align with the values that brought you to medicine—where you can practice at the top of your abilities while experiencing life outside the hospital with the depth and richness that makes all the work worthwhile.