Rush unveils $450 million cancer and neuroscience facility

Susan Newton sometimes felt like “Count Dracula” when she received blood transfusions, often in full view of other patients.

What Newton really could have used, she said Friday, is a little more privacy — particularly during eight-hour stays for chemotherapy to treat her cancer, now in remission.

Not that Newton, 30, isn’t grateful for her treatment at Rush University Medical Center, but she said she’s delighted with the hospital’s new $450 million, 500,000-square-foot outpatient facility that’s set to open Feb. 7. Newton was part of a patient advisory group on the project.

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“The huge difference is that you have a private space,” Newton said, taking a tour Friday.

Sometimes, curtains separated patients but not always, she said. The new infusion rooms have doors, couches for visitors and, in many cases, downtown skyline views.

The Joan and Paul Rubschlager Building is billed as a high-tech, one-stop outpatient treatment center for cancer as well as neurological and digestive disorders.

Dr. Omar Lateef, Rush’s president and chief executive officer, said newly diagnosed cancer patients are given a shopping list of things to do, often in several different locations, when dealing with a cancer diagnosis.

“That is a fragmentation that defines health care all over the world. That fragmentation dies here,” Lateef said.

Dr. Paul Casey, Rush’s chief medical officer, said: “You’d be hard-pressed to find anything like it in the Midwest and throughout the country.”

The new facility is expected to allow Rush to expand cancer treatment capacity by about 50%, administrators said.

The building is named after the Rubschlagers, the donors who ran Rubschlager Baking Corp., on the West Side, until it was sold in 2014.

“Giving what we can makes us feel good, and we know that what we give comes back,” Joan Rubschlager said.