The Cancer Pavilion of Froedtert & The Medical College of Wisconsin is a tremendously exciting project. What this facility and the different programs that we’re going to have in there offer to southeast Wisconsin, is a state-of-the-art, single place where a patient can come and receive all of the services that they need, including all of the support mechanisms that they may need to get their cancer taken care of.

Cancer is a disease that has to be addressed by many different disciplines, so you typically don’t just see a surgeon, or just see a medical oncologist. You may see four or five different specialists during the time that you’re receiving care for your cancer.

The Cancer Pavilion was designed specifically with our customers in mind. And our customers include certainly our patients as the number one most important customer; but their families, our referring physicians, our staff and our faculty physicians who provide care here in the Center. In order to obtain the voice of the customer, to understand what was critical to all of those different constituencies, we spent a great deal of time getting out and asking them what was important to them.

At Froedtert & The Medical College we are using a somewhat a new and a bit revolutionary way of providing a continuum of care for our patients. We believe that it's extremely important that the care be highly coordinated from the time that first phone call comes in, until all the way through the treatment, until the patient is well past and under follow-up care, essentially. We've established a mechanism to unite all of the different providers and coordinate all of that care. It consists of what we're calling the "Hub." The Hub sets up all of the appointments, obtains all of the outside records, provides all of this communication back and forth to the patient, and in addition is, remains, an ongoing point of contact for the patient all the way through their treatment course as well as well beyond the completion of their care.

In order to facilitate that level of coordination, it's very important to be able to have the different specialists able to see a patient in the same place, at the same time. Now this is called "interdisciplinary care," and what we have designed for our new Pavilion is a Cancer Clinic. All the physicians on campus who need to provide care for those patients will come and interact with the patient right there in that "home" clinic.

This is a major undertaking, building this new Pavilion. And it's being undertaken because of the strong belief that cancer patients need this level of care. And we will provide the absolutely best care in southeastern Wisconsin in this new facility.