This is something that I never thought was going to happen.
A facility like this will be transformative for our patients
This is what we’ve always imagined and now it’s real.
This Stanford Neuroscience Health Center is a physical realization of our long-held dream
and vision. The medical architecture of the last generation placed the physician
at the center of things. This building flips that.
It places the patient at the center of all things we do.
The very best patient care requires that we put many fields together, for the special
needs of that one patient. We can’t do that in the conventional health setting.
One has to start from the ground up.
It’s the first of its kind in the country to integrate 21 subspecialties in one center.
We’ve got the most advanced technology here so that patients receive the very best in
both advanced medical care and also patient-oriented compassionate care.
There’s a lot of patients that we share in common, so we all needed to be together
under one roof so that we could really collaborate with each other.
This is how new ideas are born. We meet in the halls. We may discuss a patient we’ve
both seen, have an idea we want to bounce off someone else, and the proximity is a huge
advantage in terms of facilitating these kinds of creative approaches.
It’s easy to forget sometimes what it’s like to be a patient, how much time you spend
going to visits, getting your treatment. I like the idea that the physicians are
sort of orbiting the patient, rather than the patients orbiting the physicians.
We want to make this experience for patients as stress-free as possible. They’ll be able
to receive all of their care in one visit.
I got to see five different clinicians in the span of about three hours.
I was like, “Wow! This is cool.”
Honoring the voice of our neuroscience patients was incredibly important to the development
of this project. They let us know exactly what they needed.
Some of the things that were priorities were issues of access, doorways, push buttons,
bathrooms, making sure that you have good turning radius, low counters.
We did what we call empathy mapping, and we drew what the path of travel would be for
our patients as they came into the building for all of the 21 subspecialties.
A lot of the obstacles that you had to deal with before there aren’t there anymore.
In this kind of an environment, everything just becomes calmed and settled.
I believe that the Stanford Neuroscience Health Center does represent the future of neuroscience.
We’ve seen the growth of many interdisciplinary programs: our stroke program, our comprehensive
epilepsy program, the movement disorders program. We have really tried to think about taking
research that occurs in the laboratory, and translating that to how it can help human beings.
There is something very special about this place, and I think that it’s the crosstalk
between the sciences and clinical medicine. Having this type of facility where we have
these multiple disciplines, is what will really
set us apart from any other institution in the country.
This building, it’s very physical architecture, says what we hope to say in our hearts, which
is that we will treat them in a way that opens up the world to them.
To have this building made that’s specifically for neuroscience patients is astounding.
I can’t even overstate how special this building is going to be to the neuroscience patients
from this point on. This place is special.