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."