Time, fear are two things that new $276M Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center hopes to address

If you’ve had the misfortune to visit a cancer center, you know the long waits that inevitably greet you. Wait for a blood draw, wait to meet the oncologist, who is rarely on time. And go elsewhere for the actual treatment. You might just feel like a character in Waiting for Godot eternally waiting for deliverance, but wait you have cancer, so unlike in the play, the oncologist does show up.

Waiting patiently needs to be put in the context of the emotion that is ever present in cancer patients whether a seasoned fighter battling cancer for years or the recently diagnosed. And that is fear.

Tackling time and addressing the dread is at the core of the new $276 million cancer center at the Cleveland Clinic which will open its doors March 6 to patients.

“There’s an overarching acknowledgment that when you have cancer, time changes,” said Dr. Brian Bolwell, chairman of the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute, in a phone interview. “Your life expectancy may be shortened if you only have a finite amount of time to live and waiting an extended period of time to get your blood drawn or to wait for your doctor becomes a very important thing. Becomes a big deal.”

That is one of the reasons the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center, a seven-story building boasting 377,000-square-feet of space, houses many functions under the same roof. Patients can get their blood drawn, see the oncologist, undergo diagnostic imaging and be treated all without ever having to step outside the building. Plus there is an area for meditation, a place to get wigs for those undergoing chemotherapy and losing hair and even a prosthetics area for instance for women who have undergone mastectomies. There is art and music therapy too.

“Putting everything in one building is an acknowledgment that [patients] are ill and it’s not just a matter of convenience, it’s a matter of addressing the realities of their clinical situation by making things as efficient as possible,” Bolwell said.

While convenient for patients, the aim is also to improve care delivery and foster a sense of community among multidisciplinary programs.

“We are moving a variety of entities from different geographic locations on campus into one, specifically all of medical oncology, all of our brain tumor institute, all of radiation therapy as well as much of surgical oncology is now going to be housed in the new cancer building,” he said. “And that’s a big deal because the clinic is quite good at multidisciplinary care but I think the building is going to continue to foster that and promote it.”

To reduce wait times at the lab, it was placed on the first floor of the cancer center and enough bays were added so that there would be enough room to accommodate patients and no long lines, he said.

And patients don’t need to go to a different part of the campus for infusions.

“When you have a given disease, let’s say lung cancer, you will see your physician in exactly the same location as you’ll get your infusion,” Bolwell said.

The predilection toward greater efficiency is borne by the desire to reduce the “time-to-treat” – essentially the time between an initial diagnosis and the first formal treatment, which in most cases is surgery.

“Large academic cancer centers in the U.S. are the worst in time to treat and it’s getting worse by the year, and it’s getting up to 40 days, which is a very long time when you first hear that you have cancer and I would argue that it is at least 30 days too long,” Bolwell said.

He noted that “we are obsessed” with that metric and ways to reduce that. A 2011 study

A 2011 study published in the Annals of Surgery concluded:

Wait times for cancer treatment have increased over the last decade. As case loads increase, wait times for treatment are likely to continue increasing, potentially resulting in additional treatment delay. Additional resources and strategies are needed to reduce wait times for cancer treatment in the United States.

But the new cancer center at the Cleveland Clinic wasn’t built solely to get patients in faster and make it convenient by functioning as a one-stop shop for them.

The emotional well-being of patients is something the building is designed to and the Clinic wishes to address. Bolwell noted the goal is to make the new building a place where the fear of cancer can be alleviated to the degree possible. It was created with open spaces allowing light to stream through, even in parts of the basement.

“When people receive infusions or chemotherapy or other agents there, they are all going to receive their therapy next to a window that overlooks a green space or a mall on the north side of the building — every single one of them,” he said.

The idea for an open, airy design was partly informed by visits made to recently-built well-known cancer centers with architects in tow from which the team drew insights – both what to do and what not do. [Bolwell declined to name the cancer centers that were part of the itinerary.]

“One of the cool things was that we took the architects with us so it wasn’t just a couple of docs and couple of nurses,” Bolwell declared.