“How many times do they ask you the same question if you go to various areas?” asked Tamara Sutton, service area director of oncology. “We don’t have to do that . . . so you don’t answer the same question twice; there’s less chance for error.”
Identical readers are located throughout the center to monitor the patient’s whereabouts remotely. If a patient is running late to a scheduled treatment, and they are in another area of the hospital, the patient can be paged, Sutton said.
The technology offers more than just keeping track of a patient or having their medical information at the fingertips of cancer center staff. It also allows patients to transform the world around them and maintain control while undergoing treatments or examinations.
“Let’s say you’re diagnosed with cancer today,” Sutton said. “What happens to you? You lose control of your time. You lose control of your body. You lose control of so many elements of your life. And now you’ve entered this world where there’s all this stuff. People are pulling machines in and taking you to all these places, and you have no control.”
Each examination and treatment room in the center is equipped with adjustable temperature and lighting and, in some rooms, like the linear accelerator room, projection screens. With the assistance of a small control pad on the wall, a patient can control what he or she sees, hears and feels.
Patients can set the lighting in the room to create a warm, temperature controlled autumn setting, complemented with some soft jazz in the background. The projection screen embedded in the ceiling allows the patient to view scenic vistas. And all of this information is already stored into the system, Lowe said, so that when a patient walks into a room, their settings have already been activated.
“It’s really calming for the patient to see what they want,” Lowe said. “And you can change it at any time.”
