Patients Take Back Control with Technology

Technology can be a wonderful thing. It can also be a cold and dehumanizing thing.

Unfortunately, in medicine, that often happens with one and the same device.

The very instruments that diagnose and treat us can often make us feel more like test subjects than patients receiving care. Anyone who's ever had an MRI knows the device that can find what's ailing us is also oppressively big and noisy. Woe to you if you're claustrophobic.

But technology is now being applied in the interests of healing the entire patient—mind, body, and soul.

It's happening in a big way, perhaps appropriately, next door to Hollywood, where the entertainment industry cranks out one technology-fueled blockbuster after another.

At the two-year-old Roy and Patricia Disney Family Cancer Center in Burbank, CA, patients receiving radiation at the oncology department don't just get an identifying wristband when they check in. They also get a radio-frequency identification (RFID) card.

Now, you'd expect the card to be able to let staff easily locate the patient, but what you might not be expecting is that every exam or treatment room the patient visits can sense them and adjust the room to their preferences.

Using a keypad, "they can actually preprogram their card for their music, their scenery, their temperature, and their color scheme," says administrator Jennifer Schaab. During any future visits, the card remembers these previously set preferences and more—even video—from the minute they walk in the door until the minute they leave.

For patients receiving radiation 10 to 30 times, "usually radiation is not something you want to remember," Schaab says. "This just helps to relax them and give them the control back again."

Perhaps the first center of its kind in the U.S. to employ this technology, the Disney Family Cancer Center was a project of the family of Roy Disney, nephew of Walt Disney and a longtime executive at The Walt Disney Company. The family worked with the Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center, where the Cancer Center is located, to raise the money through their foundations to build and operate the center.

I believe that what they've built is a harbinger of a kind of personalized ambience that eventually will inform a lot of patient care both inside and outside of hospital walls. The technology involved, like many that came before, is riding down the cost curve from rich person's plaything to another tool in the modern architect's toolbox.

Right now, the Disney Family Cancer Center is a showcase for several vendors whose technology went into building the environment, Schaab says. "Elekta provided all of our machines and our electronic medical record, JCI is the liaison that had to connect all of our different systems together, and Connexall is what we used for this RFID system," she says.

It all started with the vision of the center's medical director and previous service area director. "We wanted it to be very patient-centered, and really about healing the mind, body, and soul," Schaab says. "With that in mind, we really just started looking forward to all the futuristic opportunities that were out there, and when we learned about this, we just couldn't say no and kept moving forward."

The radiation department sees about 2,600 new patients a year. Providence Saint Joseph absorbs the cost of the RFID system so that it doesn't increase the patient's cost of care.

As yet, there's no data to show that the more pleasant experience has a material effect on the health of the patients. "Nothing has been published yet," Schaab says. "Patients always say how wonderful it is to be able to have this control back in their life on a day when they have no control. In the cancer world, everything's taken away from you. So now we're giving them back some of that control.

"We've had patients who may need to go into a meditative state to really relax themselves before getting radiation. They may be claustrophobic or have a lot of anxiety, so this really has helped to alleviate those symptoms," she says.

While all the evidence may not yet be in, all around healthcare, patients and their loved ones are taking control of their experience, and technology often plays a part. Patient advocate Regina Holliday, who lost her husband to kidney cancer, blogs and shares her paintings online as a form of healing and as a way of raising concerns about patients receiving appropriate care.

And much closer to home, my own wife, River Abeje, just won honorable mention at the 2012 International Black Women's Film Festival for a movie she made on her iPhone during her treatment for and recovery from breast cancer in 2008 and 2009.

So I know firsthand how powerful a force even the simplest technology can be in healing. As we continue to deploy one amazing technological advance after another, let's remember to heal the entire patient, and let them have as much control as they can along the way.