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St. Joe Company, Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, and Florida State University are partnering on a new hospital in Panama City Beach.

“The goal is pretty simple. It’s to bring in more convenient health care services to residents on the beach,” St. Joe Commercial Real Estate Senior Vice President Dan Valazquez said. “This campus would just provide another health care option for those residents that may not necessarily want to travel 15 or 20 miles for health care services.”

But it’s going to provide much more than just healthcare. Medical students from FSU’s medical school will be rotating into this facility to get practical experience.

“The hospital will also be home to a variety of educational and research programs,” Panama City Beach Mayor Mark Sheldon said. “In partnership with FSU, it provides an opportunity for residency programs and clinical rotations for FSU medical students.”

The hospital will help keep physicians in the community during a national shortage as well.

“We know that physicians tend to remain in the communities where they train,” Sheldon said. “This truly allows us to expand our health care foundation and provide more opportunities for those medical students who want to remain in Panama City Beach.”

Construction on this first medical facility began in January 2022.

“This first medical office building will offer an array of services, including primary care, urgent care, cardiology, orthopedics, and up to five ambulatory surgery centers,” Valazquez said. 

Work will continue on a 100-bed hospital and more facilities that will comprise an 87-acre medical campus.

This first medical facility should be complete and operational by the summer of 2024.

 

Source:  mypanhandle.com

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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

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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