Precision Medicine in a Translational Research Environment

Near the Intermountain Healthcare Dixie Regional Medical Center in St. George, Utah, the Intermountain Cancer Center is opening new windows of hope into new horizons of discovery and care. This translational medicine medical office building establishes an environment that truly integrates cancer research with cancer treatment.

By actually witnessing researchers at work evolving new solutions for cancer, patients and their families know they are in the hands of a caregiving team invested in their future, untethered existing protocols. And by observing patients in the care setting, researchers are inspired to know that their discoveries will evolve into new treatments and better outcomes.

The facility includes an outpatient oncology clinic, an outpatient infusion clinic, radiation oncology, outpatient imaging, research labs with high-throughput DNA sequencing laboratory and a café and auditorium. It is designed to be an oncology home in partnership with Stanford Medicine, allowing access to its database in an effort to share information with the hope of curing different types of cancer.

Community, Care and Research with a View

Now fully operational, those delivering care within the Cancer Center reported that scientists, researchers and physicians interact just by the way the building is designed. Physicians and care teams are located on the first and second floors, while genomics and research are located on the first and third floors. The Collaboration Deck — nicknamed the “Holodeck” — is the main shared space where collaborative collisions occur throughout each day between caregivers and researchers who share the same goal: to relieve human suffering.

A bistro called “The Strand,” in reference to DNA, is open to the residents of St. George and has become a community breakfast hub. This convergence of healthy community members interacting with cancer patients creates an open, community-centered healing environment.

While the facility is designed to fit the care needs of patients and staff, a final design criterion for planning was access to views, both of southern Utah’s bluffs and mesas and the restored north-south drainage wash, a native habitat for wildlife. When undergoing cancer treatment, a little nature and natural light goes a long way.

Integration AND Efficiency

The Cancer Center is now a home for care throughout a large area in the southwest, serving patients from Arizona, Southern Utah and into Las Vegas, and is the headquarters for all of Intermountain’s precision medicine, genetic counseling and precision genomics. With researchers and caregivers in the same environment, targeted genomic therapies and clinical trials can reach discoveries at an accelerated pace.

The goal of integration does not impair efficiency and throughput. The outpatient clinic utilizes the on-stage/off-stage model with medical staff located in a common work room and examination rooms organized around the medical staff work room, while patient corridors are provided between the modules at the edges to facilitate patient flow without disruption. The goal of this design is to ensure that the patient experience is as seamless and easy as possible during a time of great uncertainty.