At City of Hope, immersive healing space will tend to patients’ spiritual wellbeing

For patients facing cancer, fear and anxiety often arrive before the medicine. Sometimes the feeling is so overwhelming that patients can’t even bring themselves to leave their cars for treatment.

That was the case for Tammy McInerney, a 57-year-old Lake Forest resident diagnosed last year with stage 4 breast cancer. Spiritual therapy has become central to how she copes, and when a panic attack left her frozen in the hospital parking lot before a recent surgery, her husband played one of her therapy recordings.

“It calmed me down immensely,” she said.

At City of Hope Orange County’s new hospital, which will open its doors in December next to the already open outpatient center, a new, immersive healing space will offer such a refuge. It’s the first space of its kind anywhere, said Annette Walker, president of City of Hope Orange County, blending technology and faith-based care to soothe patients facing the weight of cancer treatment, their families and staff.

The aim, Walker said, is to create a quiet, sacred space that meets people where they are during some of the hardest moments of their lives.

The room uses technology to transform into sacred spaces representing the world’s five largest faith traditions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Patients will be able to select their preferred setting on a touchscreen, and within seconds, find themselves in a luminous temple, mosque, cathedral or meditation hall.

The room could also transport patients to an alpine forest or the Orange County coastline.

For the simulations, moving images are projected onto the wall and two side windows while natural sounds from the outside of each sacred space, such as birds, wind or cars whizzing by, create a sense of being in that place.

“In every single decision that we made here on this campus, it was about what would make the patients more comfortable. If you’re walking in with cancer and you’re afraid, what could calm you,” Walker said.

In the projected chapel, whose exterior echoes the local Mission San Juan Capistrano, sunlight streams through custom-stained glass, bathing Christ’s aura in a warm glow. Hindu patients can shift the room to a mandir, modeled after the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Chino Hills.

Roger Holzberg, former creative director at the Walt Disney Company and co-founder of Reimagine Well, was recruited to help design the space. For the former Imagineer, the immersive healing space is the culmination of a lifelong fascination with creating happy experiences — and a deeply personal reckoning with illness. Diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2004, he said he remembers sitting in a Burbank hospital room, staring at paint peeling off the wall and thinking, “This is about the most unhealthy patient experience I can imagine.”

“And I remember thinking, I know what my healing place is. My healing place is the ocean. If I could be somewhere that would feel healing to me, it would be out in the water with a dolphin swimming, and then a light bulb went off,” he said. “I went, wait a second, you’re a Disney Imagineer. You could be there every way, but physically.”

Holzberg knows illness up close, not just from his own cancer. For more than 12 years, he said he’s had annual MRIs to monitor prostate and pancreatic health. In his 20s, he was the primary caregiver for his mother at the end of her life. And when he was around 14, his teenage cousin, who lived just two blocks away, lost a battle with kidney cancer.

That’s why he was careful to calibrate the level of immersion in the room so it never overwhelms someone coping with nausea, he said. Holzberg said that was one of the trickiest challenges.

“I took myself back to the time when I might have been a little nauseous, and I was worried about that level of immersion being overwhelming for patients who might be struggling with a little equilibrium. We had to really go into an imaginary place to put ourselves in the mindset and physical sense of patients,” he said. “It sounds odd, but one of the challenges was imagining the right level of immersion.”

The main room is designed to accommodate 14 to 16 people, Holzberg said. A secondary “tranquility room” sits adjacent to accommodate one-on-one visits with clergy or counselors, or to serve patients who need to be separated for infection control or privacy. With the tranquility room door open, a person can see and hear the experience from the side without joining the group.

Another tricky element was lighting. Holzberg said that most faiths include some form of light, whether it’s the eternal light above the Ark of the Covenant in a synagogue or a prayer candle in a mosque.

“Bringing light into the room that appears to be an open flame, and gives us the sense of an open flame, but isn’t really an open flame, was a real challenge,” Holzberg said. “We found ourselves on the design side, having to blend AI-generated elements into sacred objects to make them emanate and glow from within.”

Walker noted that one of the room’s features will let patients tune in to a service from their own hospital room. If a priest, for example, is leading a service in the space, patients can turn it on and watch without leaving their room.

The larger goal, she added, is to provide an anchor of calm in a high-acuity environment.

“It just makes you feel like God is present, frankly, that it’s a special, unusual place, especially in a building that has so much commotion in it, to have this oasis of quiet and healing is, I think, going to be quite special for people,” she said.

For Rabbi Adam Greenwald of Congregation B’nai Israel in Tustin, whose congregants include two oncologists at City of Hope, the room reflects a culture that “takes care of the whole person,” he said.

“As a rabbi, I spend a lot of time visiting people in the hospital. I have seen in my work as a rabbi, time and again, the healing that comes from not just the work of the doctors,” he said. “Medicine is really best practiced as a team sport, and that is the team of all of the practitioners and caregivers, but it is also families and friends and clergy and extended community that are all needed to be in somebody’s corner, especially when they’re dealing with something as serious as cancer.”

Greenwald said he also sees power in the project’s shared stewardship among diverse clergy.

“In a polarized moment,” he added, “the image of clergy from so many different backgrounds coming together around a universal spiritual value, which is care for the sick, is a different kind of medicine that the world needs right now.”

Holzberg argues that experiences like these belong inside hospitals even if they don’t fit neatly into traditional billing systems.

“I have heard from business development folks at hospitals, ‘What billing code is there for that? Yeah, I get it that it’s better for the patient … but there’s no billing code for it, so we’re not going to fund it,’” he said. But he believes, “we are only healthy when our mind, our body and our spirit are healthy.”

He and Walker both noted research supports the benefits of faith and immersive experiences in patient recovery.

“Fortunately, over the last few years, there has been some real medical research which has started to support, particularly in cancer survivorship, that a spiritual faith base actually helps with survivorship in many ways,” Holzberg said.

When cancer patients arrive at City of Hope, they are often bracing for months or even years of grueling treatment, Walker said. Later this year, though, they will also have a space designed to care for their spirit.