VITALS
Ruckus in RuCo A big-name battle to grow in the ‘Boro has just one winner for now BY KARA HARTNETT
n April, amid lockdowns from the emerging COVID-19 pandemic, Ascension Saint Thomas executives sought permission from the state to build a neighborhood hospital at the intersection of Veterans Parkway and Shores Road near rising development on the west side of Murfreesboro. The nonprofit health system wanted to invest $24.6 million in a 32,000-square-foot facility that would host eight inpatient beds and eight emergency treatment rooms transferred from an existing hospital and create imaging and lab services and medical offices. Dubbed Westlawn Satellite Hospital, the space would serve as an extension of the 286-bed Saint Thomas Rutherford Hospital for the fast-growing neighborhood.
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Days later, Vanderbilt University Medical Center leaders filed a bolder plan — nearly five times Westlawn’s size — for a property just two blocks away. The Vanderbilt application proposed a 48-bed, 154,000-square-foot hospital at the intersection of Veterans Parkway and Interstate 840, on a plot of land the medical center purchased in 2017. The facility would cost $134 million and include eight observation beds, diagnostic and therapeutic cardiac catheterization services and neonatal intensive care services. And so commenced the bureaucratic battle — funded by $190,000 in filing fees — mediated by the Health Services and Development Agency, a branch of Tennessee government that manages growth in health care services by considering market needs. Rutherford County is the fifth-most populous county in the state, and the surrounding region is projected to grow by more than 10 percent in the next four years. Researchers from the Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Tennessee predict that by the end of this decade, Rutherford’s growth will have taken it past Hamilton County. By 2050, it is expected to be larger than Knox County.
