We're Building a Structure for the Future of Cancer Care.
Since 1947, Dana-Farber has been at the forefront of blending exceptional cancer care with leading-edge, transformative science. At the core of what we do is a patient-centered approach with a singular focus — cancer care. That focus has driven us throughout our history, and it has resulted in plans for a new dedicated inpatient cancer hospital, and a transformative clinical collaboration.
Owned and operated by Dana-Farber, the proposed Future Cancer Hospital will be the only independent cancer hospital in the region. It is the right care model for the future of cancer care and will allow us to provide the best care for our patients for years to come.
Our new collaboration with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Harvard-affiliated academic medical center, and its affiliated physician group, Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians (HMFP), will provide cancer patients with integrated cancer care in an environment focused exclusively on cancer.
Combined, the proposed Future Cancer Hospital and the new collaboration will pair our singular focus on cancer and clinical leadership with the world-class expertise of BIDMC and its HMS-affiliated faculty physicians to care for all the cancer and sub-specialty needs of Dana-Farber’s patients and their families.
Developing a facility that's focused and built and designed around cancer patients and cancer therapy is the future of cancer, and we've dreamed of having such a building. And we're now building it. This is the right time to build the cancer hospital because cancer is becoming much more common. It's affecting younger and younger patients, and we need the capacity to take care of those patients. It's also a time of transformation for cancer care, and we need to have the optimal facilities to take care of those patients. So the mission of the Dana-Farber has been clear from our inception to provide the very best cancer care, the construction of this cancer hospital, the only dedicated cancer hospital in New England. Uh, and the collaboration with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is really an extension of that mission. We are tremendously complimentary organizations. We're organizations that care deeply about the same things. But what we also share is an acknowledgement that the way that we have been doing things is not gonna be enough for the future. Nearly. All of the dedicated cancer centers are building their own hospitals or have built their own hospitals that are entirely for cancer patients. This is an opportunity to bring together two extraordinary organizations to create something that's fundamentally new and different, the opportunity to create a model of cancer care that really doesn't exist, at least not in this region. So when I think about how. Dana-Farber, Beth Israel Deaconess, and Harvard Medical faculty physicians really complement each other. I think you can see the model even in the floor plan of the buildings. The new hospital is going to be connected to the Beth Israel and to the Dana-Farber in, you know, really a circle of hallways so that you're going to be able to travel from one to the other through these connectors. Cancer patients often. and need to be surrounded by their family and so the rooms will be designed so that the patient is comfortable, they get the care they need, but there's also room and space for family members. So our patients and family members have been involved with us since we began conceiving of what this building would look like to think through with us what is a patient going to need? what's their family member going to need. The building itself will be designed to handle the air around patients so that they're protected from pathogens and other viruses in the environment so that they're safe inside the hospital. With this new hospital, we will follow patients with experts in their kind of cancer in all of our disciplines from beginning to end. Cancer. Patients have very special needs and having a dedicated team of professionals from the physicians to the front desk staff who understand what that experience is like, who understand what those needs may be and can tailor that experience to support them and their families, uh, can be such an important part of the therapeutic journey. Having an inpatient facility tied to our outpatient. and connected to our research enterprise allows us to do bench to bedside, but importantly bedside to bench research and that uh cycle of learning from patients and how they respond to therapies really accelerates our ability to develop new therapies. That is a virtuous cycle if you have fantastic scientists who work with wonderful physicians. They teach each other things. The physicians think like scientists. The scientists think like clinicians, and together we can advance cancer care much better than either could alone. And that way we can really build something unique, right? This incredible research cancer institution linked to the community in a direct way, making that science go from bench to bedside to community in a really effective way. Patients do better. In a dedicated cancer hospital, that's not my opinion. That's actually what the data shows us. Outcomes are better for patients in a dedicated cancer hospital and by outcomes I mean survival. Patient survival is better in a dedicated cancer hospital. I'm not just excited about the building. I'm excited about building an opportunity for anybody who gets diagnosed with cancer to have direct access to this incredible specialists. I'm excited about the opportunity to move away barriers. Like, uh, travel and, uh, resources from people, uh, and, and the things that stop them from getting their cancer care, it's about creating a space for the next generation of cancer care. We're building a hospital designed not just for the next 5 years of cancer care, but the next 50 years of cancer care. Healthcare is a team sport. We all know that and so being able to build the very best. Teams with the very best professionals across both of our organizations and deliver that in a standalone cancer hospital. That is an amazingly unique opportunity. So this is the right time for Boston. This is the right time for Massachusetts and it's the right time for New England to bring this. There's never been an opportunity like this one to truly create that difference. On the kind of scale that we're talking about, we're very honored to be able to bring this model to New England. It really is the opportunity of a lifetime. Sydney Farber, when he first started treating children with leukemia, developed this concept of total cancer care, bringing every specialist that is needed for the care of that patient to the patient's bedside, and that has been our aspiration throughout our history. We're not just raising the building, we're raising the standard of cancer care for everyone.
