Published December 2005

Work starts on
$62.4M cancer center

Illustration courtesy of Anshen + Allen, Architects, Seattle This five-story, $62.4 million, 100,000-square-foot cancer facility is under construction in Everett, financed and staffed by Providence Everett Medical Center, The Everett Clinic, Western Washington Medical Group and Northwest Washington Radiation Oncology Associates.

By John Wolcott
SCBJ Editor

Last month’s groundbreaking ceremony for Providence Everett Medical Center’s new cancer center in north Everett marked the start of the first new facility in the hospital’s 20-year expansion master plan, a $400 million venture announced earlier this year for its Colby Avenue campus.

The medical center, celebrating a century of health care in Everett in 2005 by the Sisters of Providence, intends to replace aging health-care facilities at that site, as well as expand the size and capabilities of the regional medical facility.

The key to establishing the cancer-care facility is the unusual collaboration by Everett health-care providers who are generally competitors, including Providence Everett Medical Center, The Everett Clinic, Western Washington Medical Group and Northwest Washington Radiation Oncology Associates.

When it’s completed in May 2007, the Northwest region’s cancer care will be concentrated in one facility, a great advantage for patients as well as physicians. In the center’s first year of operation, it’s expected to serve more than 2,500 new patients and those needing follow-up care. The facility will serve not only Snohomish County but also four other Northwest counties, including Skagit, Whatcom, Island and San Juan.

Anne Hartline, an employee of the hospital, said the new center will eliminate long, wearying trips to Seattle for treatment. Although high-level cancer care has been available in Everett for several years, the new cancer center will include all of those services in one location, providing efficiencies that will help both patients and the medical community.

For Hartline, the new center has particular significance. She has been diagnosed with breast cancer twice. She has beaten it both times. She knows full well the importance the new center will make in the treatment of other women battling the deadly disease.

“It was a difficult and confusing time when I began the journey in 1997,” she told an audience of county, city and hospital officials at the Nov. 7 groundbreaking ceremony for the $62.4 million, 100,000-square-foot facility, which will be built on the north side of PEMC’s Colby Avenue campus.

“The diagnosis alone created stress, confusion and chaos. It amplified as I was faced with choosing providers and treatment,” she recalled. She was fortunate, she said, that she knew the local health-care system and had local access to support, information and treatment that were vital to her decisions and needs.

But her treatment came in bits and pieces. Too often, she said, health-care providers didn’t communicate well with each other. Requests for lab results or an X-ray report were meant to be sent to specific doctors, yet when she arrived for appointments, the needed information often hadn’t arrived. Sometimes, one doctor didn’t know what procedures or tests had been done by another physician.

“At best, the process is frustrating and stressful. At its worst, it can paralyze and overwhelm people,” Hartline said. “With my second (cancer) journey in 2003, I was far more knowledgeable about resources and options, and I was delighted to find there were treatment advances. When you can follow chemo with a latte and a cookie, you know the anti-nausea drug is working.”

She calls the new cancer center “a coming together of ‘best practices,’ sharing information, true partnering and putting patients first, providing them with the best care possible, seamlessly, in our own community.”

When the facility is finished, it will provide everything the $40 million Cancer Center Alliance provides in Seattle, except for bone-marrow transplants.

The five-story cancer center also will include 38,000 square feet for medical offices, a 489-stall parking garage and $12 million in high-tech radiation equipment for diagnosis and treatment.

Companies involved include the general contractor, Mortenson Construction Co., and the architect, Anshen + Allen, Seattle.

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