Fifteen years ago, Baystate Health opened its D’Amour Center for Cancer Care.

The state-of-the art facility brought state-of-the-art radiation treatment, including intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), as well as stereotactic radiosurgery and body radiotherapy, to cancer patients in western Massachusetts. These techniques allow for enhanced radiation dosing to tumors while limiting doses of radiation to normal tissue, and were just beginning to be adopted in 2004.

During those early years we also introduced the first prototype of image-guided radiation therapy, allowing for precise radiation delivery to tumors in organs that normally shift in the body.

These two advances in radiation therapy in terms of accuracy and side effects represented a major advance in treatment for patients. We have just completed a multi-year program to replace and update our radiation therapy equipment, ensuring once again that we are offering the very best, and best-evidenced, cancer care to our region.

But the most significant pioneering aspect at the time — and that has stood the test of time — is how the building was designed to deliver care.

It goes without saying that while a cancer program is not about a building, you can make a building facilitate your approach to caring for patients, and a metaphor for that approach.

We took the view that patients need access to a diverse, yet integrated team of caregivers on site to receive the best results from treatment advances. We also wished to create a sense of calm, avoiding the usual hubbub of clinical activity that is the hallmark of busy practices and programs.

As we built the center, we tried to separate public from patient space in a comfortable, unconfining way but also to integrate the clinical activities behind the scenes so no area would be dedicated to one physician specialty.

This is very different from many cancer centers that have “everything under one roof” but effectively operate as a medical office building, lacking true integration.

Our integrated approach in 2004 drew international attention. We had many executives tour the building after opening, including a delegation from the National Health Service in the United Kingdom as well as a visit from the deputy minister of health from the Australian state of Tasmania; all were interested in the integrated approach and the advanced teamwork the building facilitated, and the improved outcomes we aimed to achieve.

And the need for experienced teams to look after cancer patients, to understand and manage their diseases, and to deploy the ever-evolving approaches involved effectively, has never been more necessary than now.

Today’s explosion of knowledge demands a team of cancer care professionals who can work together to determine what are clearly well evidenced therapeutic advances among the promoted possibilities, the newly approved and the recently completed studies, and incorporate them into a patient’s treatment.

There are very few cancers that are treated at the D’Amour Center by just one physician interacting with a patient.

Almost inevitably multiple physicians are either working on treatment concurrently or in sequence, not to mention the many other disciplines and personnel — nursing, pharmacy, social work, radiation technologists, dosimetrists, and medical physicists, as well as insurance and coordinating specialists — who are essential to safe, comprehensive cancer care, even though patients and their families may not interact directly with them.

Each year some 7,000 individual patients get some form of care in at the D’Amour Center. That may constitute one visit for consultation or surveillance, or it may be multiple visits for ongoing therapy.

When we first opened, we probably saw 225 to 250 people a day in the building; now we routinely see 350 people a day and the building – which was designed to unfold for the patient with concourses rather than traditional waiting rooms — has been able to hold that volume without feeling crowded.

The planned-out approach we took back in 2004 has allowed us to manage cancer care with the best possible success for our patients over the last 15 years and with the teamwork to continue this integrated approach well into the future.

Dr. Wilson C. Mertens is vice president, medical director of cancer services at Baystate Regional Cancer Program based in Springfield.