Case Study // Sutter Roseville Cancer Center
BA and Sutter Health designed the Sutter Roseville Cancer Center around one finding from patients: in cancer care, relationships matter most. The 18,500-square-foot outpatient clinic, completed in July 2016 on Sutter's Roseville campus, brings medical, surgical, and gynecological oncology together with lab services, under the same roof as clinical research and infusion.
The Challenge
Designing an oncology clinic that truly serves its patients starts with understanding those patients' needs. Treatment often brings anxiety, pain, and a sense of helplessness, and care is spread across specialists, tests, and treatment types. Every handoff between disconnected people and disconnected spaces is a chance for a patient to feel lost. Clinicians need special support, too, because the emotional demands of cancer care put teams at risk of compassion fatigue and burnout.
Sutter needed to relieve capacity constraints on its Roseville campus and offer more integrated cancer services to the community. When Sutter Medical Foundation held focus groups with patients and their companions, one theme rose above the rest. "You're scared. You don't know if you are going to make it," one patient said. "(We need) the personal touch."
That established the project's central question: How can a clinic support both the emotional and physical experience of cancer by nurturing the relationships between patients, companions, and care teams?
The Approach
BA combined evidence-based design, lean process improvement, and experience-based methods. Pre-design began with a focus group with patients and companions, a clinician survey, and a week-long lean event where patients, family volunteers, clinicians, administrators, and designers co-created the clinic together. The team built full-scale cardboard mockups and ran care simulations inside them, testing ideas with the people who would live with the results.
The team designed the patient journey first. They mapped each step on a single clinic visit and traced the path from screening and diagnosis through treatment and survivorship. This process showed where waits, long walks, and handoffs broke the thread of care. The goal was an ideal visit, with more points of human connection and fewer disconnects. The facility program and spaces were then shaped to support that experience, with goals for patient dignity, continuity of care, patient-provider communication, and family engagement.
The Design
One Home for Oncology Services
Medical and surgical oncology, lab services, clinical research, and infusion share one building, along with patient education and a healing garden. Co-location lets clinicians coordinate care, spares patients from making trips across campus, and puts lab results within reach during the visit.
A Warm Arrival
Parking is a known source of frustration for cancer patients. At Roseville, a valet greets each patient on arrival, removing the stress of finding a space or running late, so patient and companion walk in together. The valet sees them off at the end of the visit as well.
An Exam Room Built for Conversation
The exam room was the focus of the mockup event and required especially careful design consideration. Vitals are taken in the room, so sensitive information like weight stays private and patients skip a stop in a semi-public corridor. An in-room printer means the clinician never steps out for care plan materials. Other thoughtful touches include eye-level contact between clinicians and patients and clear visual access to monitors for ease of communication.
More than half of Roseville patients bring at least one companion, so each room includes a family zone with a privacy curtain, letting companions stay while the patient changes. A sliding door eases wheelchair access and lets staff check in with a provider without exposing the patient to the corridor.
Team Pods that Keep Care Connected
Each work pod holds two care teams, with two physicians, two nurses, two medical assistants, and two PSCs, a ratio set during the pre-design simulation. Adjacent workstations and a large window into each provider office keep teammates in view, while the office still offers privacy for focused work and difficult calls. Clear sightlines to the exam rooms help team members find each other fast. Clinicians from every specialty share a morning huddle space, everyone has daylight and views, and quiet rooms double as places for staff respite.
This pod arrangement "makes it much easier to get answers and hear what is going on with the patient so everyone can be on the same page," one PSC said. "It makes the team stronger and healthier as well."
Outcomes
Post-occupancy surveys, focus groups, and observations compared Roseville with another Sutter oncology clinic, and the findings point to one conclusion: the design strengthens relationships for patients and care teams alike.
Patients rated their exam room experience highly across the board, from feeling at ease during vitals to having room for companions and privacy that honors their dignity. Clinicians were more likely than their peers to name the exam room as where they connect with patients and the team pod as where they connect with each other. They also gave higher marks for teamwork, access to respite, the co-located lab, and overall workplace satisfaction. And those gains came in a smaller footprint, with Roseville's exam rooms being about 5 percent smaller and less costly than those in Sutter's existing facilities.
The Gold Touchstone Award recognized BA’s success in conducting an evidence-based, research-informed process that led to improved experiences for patients and clinicians alike.
