The patients were the celebrities when Children’s Hospital Colorado, the Ryan Seacrest Foundation and the Children’s Hospital Colorado Foundation celebrated the late June opening of a new, state-of-the-art multi-media broadcasting studio at the Children’s Hospital in Aurora.
Patients walked or were assisted down a red carpet to get to the hospital atrium, where they could watch the curtains part on the glass-walled Seacrest Studio on the east side. Seacrest and his family attended the event, and when the speeches ended, he took to the studio’s microphone to interview celebrities who attended at his request: members of the group Lady Antebellum. Others on hand for the event were musical duo MKTO, Disney star Stefanie Scott and former Rockies first baseman Todd Helton.
Seacrest told the crowd that he had asked Lady Antebellum to attend the event at the finale of “American Idol,” and it “took half a second” for them to accept.
The 1,000-sq-ft studio is the seventh one funded by Seacrest’s foundation, with the intent that patients and families “will benefit from the studio’s interactive nature and find a creative outlet and healing opportunity during their stay,” according to the foundation.
The studio is home to a new closed-circuit television channel called BBoy 45 (BBoy for Balloon Boy), where patients at the Aurora Fitzsimons medical campus, the CHC North Campus, and CHC South Campus can view and respond to the studio’s programming.
During the opening event, BBoy 45 was tied to the channel at the Seacrest Studio at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Eventually, said Children’s CEO Jim Shmerling, all the studios’ channels will be linked together to share programming. He said that after he visited the studio in Atlanta and learned from a patient and her mother how much access to the studio had helped them, he wanted one for CHC. The next studio to come on line will be in Boston.
The studio was designed by FKP Architects in Dallas, with H+L Architecture of Denver serving as architect-of-record, and built by GH Phipps Construction Cos., Greenwood Village.
