By DAVID STEINKRAUS
Journal Times | Posted: Wednesday, May 21, 2008 12:00 am
MILWAUKEE - The new cancer center which Froedtert & Community Health opened on Monday looks very much like the new Cardiovascular Institute at at Wheaton Franciscan-All Saints and the new Wheaton Franciscan hospital in Franklin. And it also doesn't.
What is similar are the colors - soft greens and wood tones - and an abundance of natural light from the windows which wrap around the building. The medical is generally downplayed in rooms in favor of the comfortable and homey. The building emphasizes the concentration of services for patients; people don't have to take long walks through a maze of corridors to reach several different physicians.
What is different is the scale of concentration. Next to the cafeteria, tucked into a glass corner of the five-story building, is a pharmacy stocked specifically for the needs of cancer patients. There is a dedicated MRI machine and a dedicated laboratory where technicians will run cancer-specific tests so that by the time physician and patient meet in an exam room the results are already in the computer system.
Just down the hall from the cafeteria is the aesthetics room where Jeanette Bakos, who grew up on College Avenue in Racine, advises women about wigs and makeup, and has a selection of post-mastectomy garments for them to try on. "We have skin care with a special oncology protocol." That means products to help with radiation burn and the skin growth and nail problems brought about by cell-inhibiting chemotherapy.
The center added three linear accelerators to the three in the adjacent existing radiation department. But the new rooms are different, said John Balzer, Froedtert's vice president of facility planning and development. Typically the entrance is a passage which turns back on itself to provide thick walls for radiation shielding. The new accelerator rooms were designed with straight, short entry passages to reduce anxiety. "It forced us to invest in a door that weighs 28,000 pounds."
The main patient areas are designed in three concentric sections. On the outside, next to all the windows, are the waiting rooms complete with wireless Internet connections for family and patient. The next section inward are examination rooms. In the center is staff space, deliberately isolated so that patient records and conversations about patients are contained, and so that the medical staff has quiet space to think or to meet and talk, he said.
If you count the three levels of parking below it, the cancer occupies 500,000 square feet. It's 300,000 without the parking. The top two floors have administrative offices and others not related to cancer so there's space for growth. But, he said, the design team also thought through the possibility that cancer may be cured in a few years so the building can also be easily renovated to provide space for other uses.
The total cost is $95 million, and that includes not only the building but all the machines in it and the art on the walls, Balzer said.
He is proud of the green building limits which the structure adhered to, but he is also proud of the atrium which doesn't exist. It had been in the original plan, he said, a five-story space where people could look down on the lobby. "Then you start to say, 'What's the payback in health care?'" So designers dropped the $1.8 million atrium and instead topped the lobby with a $20,000 roof covered with plants that should require no maintenance.
The patient's view
Fran Martin, a retired Milwaukee lawyer who lives in Caledonia, said she chose Froedtert for treatment when she was diagnosed last spring with mantle cell lymphoma. She could have gone to a medical center on the East or West Coast, but the treatment protocol would have been the same, she said.
"And Froedtert is very excellent in this area," said her husband, Peter. No disrespect to other area medical groups, he said, but it is a medical teaching hospital and as in cabinet making or other fields, experience and practice count.
The disease has only been identified in the last decade or so as a lymphoma subtype. "We don't have good, like, 20-, 30-year follow up in mantle cell lymphoma," said her oncologist, Dr. Tim Fenske who treats primarily lymphoma cases.
He gave Martin an aggressive treatment: chemotherapy, then an intense dose of chemo to wipe out any residual cancer followed by a blood stem cell transplant using her own stored cells. The treatment is new. There's no sign of Martin's lymphoma now, and that, said Fenske, means it is either in remission and will remain so for years, or it means that in this new protocol physicians may have found a treatment to wipe out the disease.
If the new center was something for the Martins to admire during a preview on Friday, it will also help Fenske because he will be grouped with the 13 other cancer subspecialists. Just a bit higher in the building are the offices of the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry which keeps data on everyone who has had a blood stem cell transplant. There reside data about other lymphoma patients like Martin and how well they have done, data which have not been published but which is there for the asking. "It's really quite easy for me to walk upstairs and find the right people who do those kinds of queries," Fenske said.
Despite warnings beforehand from acquaintances, Martin said, she never felt at Froedtert as if she had become a number in a system.
And it is that philosophy, Fenske said, which the hospital has tried to formalize in its new center.