The campus will include opportunities for FSU researchers focused on aging and digital health, as well as residency programs and clinical rotations for FSU medical students.
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Local stakeholders are eager to see how the area’s newest medical project will impact the region.
Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare discussed its plans for the new FSU Health campus at Wednesday morning’s economic development alliance meeting.
“I tell people every day, over the next five to ten years, you’re not going to recognize this area. It’s not just Bay County, it’s really throughout the Panhandle area. A lot of it has to do with companies like Tallahassee Health looking in our community,” Bay County EDA President/CEO Becca Hardin said.
On Wednesday, Bay Economic Development Alliance investors got a progress report on the new FSU health medical office building and future hospital.
Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare partnered with FSU and the St. Joe company in 2021, realizing the venture would be a wise investment.
“We saw the growth of this area, we saw the need. We go back to our mission, our values, and for where we wanted to grow and for what we wanted to do while maintaining that mission and those values, we wanted to have a landscape that made sense. Really, when you look at Bay County and really the surrounding areas it made a lot of sense,” TMH Chief Health Operations Officer Andrew Starr said.
The 80,000-square-foot medical office building opened in July. Patients are already using primary and urgent care services.
The new 180-bed hospital will be more than 300,000 square feet and will create hundreds of jobs.
“Between the medical office building and the hospital, we will clearly have 500 net new jobs. We’re still working through the design, but it could be as much as a thousand,” Starr said.
“If you’re looking at a thousand new jobs coming into the area, you have to look at the economic impact of those jobs. People will be buying homes, people will be buying cars, kids will be in school, there’s more money in the bank. It’s just a tremendous economic ripple effect when you see that volume of new jobs coming to your community,” Hardin said.
Officials should break ground on the hospital in January and open in 2027.
Source: My Panhandle
The building is the first of several planned for the 87-acre campus being jointly planned and developed by St. Joe, TMH and Florida State University (FSU).
Site work has begun on a new 87-acre medical complex in Panama City Beach, Fla., that will include an ASC, facilities for orthopedic surgery and cardiology, a hospital, urgent care and primary care, according to an Aug. 29 report from the Panama City News Herald.
The center is being built through a partnership between Tallahassee (Fla.) Memorial Healthcare, Tallahassee-based Florida State University and St. Joe Company, a developer.
The hospital building was originally slated to open with 30 to 40 inpatient beds, before expanding to 100 down the line, but due to demand, the facility may need all 100 beds now, according to the report.
The medical office building on the currently-unnamed campus is expected to open sometime in 2024, with the hospital set to open in 2027.
“There’s a lot of great hospitals in this area, but [they] are a distance away,” Andrew Starr, chief health operations officer at Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare, told the Herald. “That [creates] a real opportunity [for this campus], and also a situation that needs to be bridged as you have more and more citizens moving into this immediate area and the surrounding areas. Having a healthcare infrastructure to further support the growth and population is not a want, it’s a need.”
Source: Becker’s ASC Review
For Becca Hardin, president of the Bay County Economic Development Alliance, having a hospital on the beach will be nothing short of “game-changing.”
During the EDA’s January investor’s meeting, officials gave an update on the upcoming health care campus slated to be built in Panama City Beach through a joint venture partnership between the St. Joe Co., Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare and Florida State University. The project was first announced in April last year.
“There are some game-changing projects that are happening in Bay County,” Hardin said during the meeting. “There are many other examples (of this), but one … is the new hospital complex that is being built on Highway 79 in Panama City Beach.
“We have seen the artist renderings of the campus and I’ll tell you, it’s impressive,” she added. “It’s going to be such a great (addition) not only for our community, but for the entire region.”
Andrew Starr, vice president of Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare, said there is no denying Bay County needs another hospital, especially considering the constant growth of the Panama City Beach area.
Information from the meeting notes that the hospital will sit just 7.5 miles from the Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport, which last year shattered its previous annual passenger record from 2019.
The health care campus also will be located about 30 to 45 minutes from any nearby hospitals, including Gulf Coast Regional Medical Center, Ascension Sacred Heart Bay and Ascension Sacred Heart Hospital Emerald Coast.
“This area is growing by leaps and bounds, so … you have all this opportunity (and) a need to build an infrastructure to support that opportunity here and now and more importantly, in the future,” Starr said during Wednesday’s meeting. “There’s nothing but upwards momentum in this area.”
The current goal of the project is to first build a medical office building to set up the fundamentals. The long-term vision then is for that to expand into a hospital that covers 320,000 square feet and boasts four medical office buildings and 500 beds.
Starr said a master agreement with St. Joe already is in place and a general contractor has been selected.
He hoped for the medical office building to open sometime in 2024.
“This is going to be a local facility,” Starr said. “This facility will not be called TMH (Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare). That is not what we are intending to do. Most likely, it is going be called FSU Health (because) it is a campus that belongs to this community.
“Yes, there will be a relationship (with TMH) but the reality is this is going to be (the residents’) campus,” he added. “There’s a big difference between being part of a local organization that cares about community … and being part of a bigger conglomerate.”
Source: Panama City News Herald