Consultation Policy
Each year, St. Jude faculty provides consultation, advice or second opinions on more than 3,000 cases.
We offer both informal consultations with individual St. Jude clinicians and formal consultations with our multidisciplinary groups. During both types of consultations, we will discuss the patient's case and offer recommendations.
St. Jude does not generally bring patients to Memphis for consultation unless those patients are likely to be eligible for St. Jude clinical trials.
How to request a consult or second opinion
Step 1: Determine patient eligibility
St. Jude treats children and young adults with newly diagnosed untreated or suspected pediatric cancer, HIV infections, or certain hematologic or genetic diseases. To request a consult, a child must:
- Have a disease we treat, or
- Require a treatment for which we have expertise, such as surgery or bone marrow transplant.
Step 2: Provide information needed to initiate a consult
When you contact St. Jude, we will request standard demographic information to initiate the second opinion or consultation process. This includes:
- Referring physician name and contact information
- Patient’s name
- Patient’s date of birth
- Patient’s address and phone number
- Patient diagnosis and treatment history
Step 3: Contact St. Jude
Physicians should contact St. Jude to request a free consultation. You can do this three ways:
- Contact the Physician / Patient Referral Office. This is the primary way to reach St. Jude for consultation information and requests.
- Call: 1-888-226-4343 (toll-free)
- Email: referralinfo@stjude.org
- Online: referral form
- For specific service lines, you can also reach out to individual consultation contacts. These include:
Step 4: Follow-up with additional information as needed
If a more formal medical record evaluation is requested, additional specific information may be required. This could include:
- Clinical summary from diagnosis to present, including all specific treatment flow sheets, dates and doses of chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy
- All appropriate diagnostic material including paraffin blocks, H & E slides of the tumor, or bone marrow aspirate and biopsy slides
- All CT, MRI or nuclear medicine films and reports from the date of diagnosis
- The most recent disease evaluation. This can include either imaging studies or marrow aspirates and biopsies.
- Surgery dates and OR reports
- Immunocytology or immunopathology reports, including any and all flow studies or any and all molecular studies
- Any cryopreserved tumor, stem cells, or marrow reports
- The most recent general evaluation, including as appropriate the ECHO, EKG, cardiac, liver function tests and metabolic studies
- Any other appropriate information specific to the tumor type