Seacrest Studios Unveiled At DC Children's Hospital

Radio/TV personality Ryan Seacreat along with Robin Thicke and "Pretty Little Liars" actress Lucy Hale led an inaugural broadcast to patients and a live audience that filled the atrium at Children's National Health System this week. They were also joined by country artist Cam and gold medal-winning Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky.

Funded in part by the Ryan Seacrest Foundation, the new $800,000 studio is meant to be a diversion for pediatric patients and could also help draw celebrity visitors to the hospital, officials said.

"This is all I really know how to do, is stand in a studio and talk in a microphone. And we wanted to build something tangible for kids that could distract them from what they were going through," Seacrest told the Washington DC Business Journal.

It is the ninth such studio funded by Seacrest to open in a children’s hospital. Others are in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Dallas, Denver, Boston, Charlotte, North Carolina, Cincinnati, and Orange, California.

The studio will host TV and radio programming such as game shows, top 40 music, appearances from celebrities and karaoke, officials said. It will operate under the station handle WPAW-90. With some help from Bethesda-based GetWellNetwork, the closed-circuit television and radio station will allow patients who are unable to leave their rooms the opportunity to virtually interact with what is happening in the studio.