Smyrna’s StoneCrest Medical Plans $15.8M Expansion
Published Jul 22, 2008
Neil A. Heatherly is CEO of Smyrna’s StoneCrest Medical Center, which is undergoing a $15.8 million expansion.
It didn’t take long for StoneCrest Medical Center in Smyrna to need more beds and surgical units. The hospital, which opened in 2003 with 75 beds, is in the midst of a $15.8 million expansion to add 26 more, along with four surgical suites.
The addition is filling out a fourth-floor “shell” that was built with the existing hospital; the building was designed to add two more floors on top of that when the need is there.
And it likely will be. Rutherford is Tennessee’s fastest-growing county. By some estimates, Smyrna alone has grown 67 percent since 2002, and the demand for medical services is clearly growing with it.
When parent TriStar Health System announced plans in 2007 for StoneCrest’s expansion, it noted outpatient visits had more than tripled since the first full year of operation and surgical volumes increased by a third.
The new beds will be ready in January 2009 and bring the hospital to 101 beds. The surgical suites will be finished in April 2009; two will be outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment to handle everything from general surgery to spinal procedures.
“We like the flexibility,” says Neil Heatherly, StoneCrest’s CEO.
StoneCrest already has increased its nursery capacity, opened a Neurological Rehabilitation Center and added digital mammography capabilities, but the hospital’s significance goes beyond its own walls. Heatherly points to more local doctors plus restaurants, supermarkets and retail stores along the bustling Sam Ridley Parkway corridor, where the hospital is located.
“The physician-practice growth is clear and immediate, as is other medical-related growth,” Heatherly says. “In addition to that, we’ve sparked economic development or maybe accelerated it.
We have a pretty substantial daytime population.”
The hospital has about 500 employees; the expansion will add another 50 to 75.
Building out 12,000 square feet within an occupied hospital has its challenges, and Heatherly says the goal is to use scaffolding to keep most of the “traffic” outside the walls to minimize disruptions. But the third floor is occupied, and contractors will have to work around it.
“We have a fairly aggressive timetable we hope to hit,” he says.
The expansion has particular meaning because it will push bed capacity over the 100 mark.
When HCA Inc., corporate parent of the TriStar system, closed the old Smyrna Hospital in 1987, Dr. Thomas Frist Sr., the company’s founder, pronounced: “I see a day when the community will grow enough that it will need a 100-bed hospital. When that time comes, we will build a hospital in Smyrna.” Smyrna has indeed grown, and Heatherly says HCA is keeping its word to the community.
“It is a fulfillment of that promise he made over two decades ago,” Heatherly says. “It gives the expansion an additional sense of purpose.”
Story by Pamela Coyle
Photo by Jeff Adkins
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