Northwestern Medicine Delnor expands cancer care center in Geneva

Certified medical assistant Aimee Van Ripper has helped people combat illness at Northwestern Medicine’s Delnor Cancer Center in Geneva for seven years. And with the center’s recent expansion, unveiled at an open house Thursday, the battleground has improved.

“I’m very very proud (of the center). It’s my favorite job,” she said.

Van Ripper was one of the workers showing off the $22 million expansion to guests.

The expansion added 15,500 square feet to the building, which is on the campus of Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital on Randall Road.

Besides enlarging the building, the center also remodeled existing space. It doubled the check-in and checkout bays, and added a beverage station to the waiting room.

Van Ripper noted the center has more than double the examination rooms now, going from 17 to 37. “We were always trying to manage rooms (before),” she said.

There’s space now for specialty-care physicians and support services, including neurologists, oncology surgeons and social workers, to see patients, Van Ripper said.

The rooms feature new, lower examination tables, more accessible to people who would have difficulty climbing onto a standard table.

According to the center’s state application for approval of the expansion, filed in 2018, cancer was the age-adjusted leading cause of death in its service area.

Demand for treatment services grew substantially between 2016 and 2021, according to the application, pushing the center’s capacity. That included a 59% increase in chemotherapy infusion treatment hours.

Delnor has had an outpatient cancer care center on its campus since 1996, starting with the Raymond G. Scott Cancer Center, the first in the Tri-Cities area to offer outpatient radiation treatment. The current version was built in 2012.

In 2013, the infusion area was treating about 30 people per day, according to registered nurse Ruth Marston.

Now, it handles 80 to 100 patients a day, Marston said, in 31 rooms. Before, it had 19 infusion stations.

The new infusion rooms are private, which is more comfortable for patients who may spend up to seven hours in one receiving chemotherapy. Before, there were a few semiprivate rooms, Marston said.

And even though all the infusion rooms have a television for patients to watch, some rooms are more popular than others. “Everybody loves to be on the (stormwater) pond,” Marston said, where they can watch waterfowl swim.

The center enlarged its pharmacy, adding another hooded station where pharmacists can safely prepare the chemotherapy treatments.

It upgraded its technology to promote collaboration with treatment providers throughout the Northwestern Medicine system, including Northwestern’s academic hospital in Chicago.

And it is testing using a drone to deliver materials, such as blood tests, between the cancer care center and a laboratory in the main hospital. That would allow nurses to spend their time with patients, instead of walking back and forth across a large parking lot.