RUSH unveils $450 million cancer and neuroscience facility

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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 bit more privacy — particularly during her eight-hour stays for chemotherapy to treat her cancer, which is 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, which had its ribbon cutting Friday.

“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 city skyline views.

The Joan and Paul Rubschlager Building is also being 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 CEO, 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 during the ribbon cutting.

Dr. Paul Casey, 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% in any given year, 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.