What’s on the horizon for pediatric oncology?
In five to six years, we’ll have brand new facilities in the Children’s and Women’s Hospital that will be built behind the Weinberg Building. This will be wonderful, but we can’t wait that long to update and expand our pediatric oncology inpatient unit and outpatient clinic. To bridge the gap, the Children’s Cancer Foundation has donated funds to allow us to renovate our current space in the Children’s Center and an 8,000-square-foot space in the Outpatient Center. Often we think of temporary fixes as being mediocre. Is that the case here? No, we’re talking state-of-the-art. It will have 20 inpatient rooms, twice as many as we have now. They will all be private rooms with the most up-to-date technologies, including real-time acquisition of patient information, electronic patient records, and a clinical trials system that links the protocol to the patient’s records to alert the medical team to potential red flags or treatment contraindications. That raises the issue of safety. You can’t
