Nashville’s Health Care Industry and Modular Building: How the Two Can Work Together

Keeping a Pulse on Ever Expanding Industry

“Nashville is a city under construction.” This statement by the local newspaper, The Tennessean, is no exaggeration. In 2015 alone, Nashville issued more than $2.4 billion in building permits, with $1.8 billion of construction activity already in progress, which includes several hospital expansion projects.

Nationwide, architects and construction companies expect to see continued growth in the construction of healthcare facilities, predicting everything from “slow but steady” to “strong” growth outlooks. The biggest opportunities lie in the construction of outpatient facilities, as ambulatory care centers remain critical to the processes of patient diagnosis, consultation, treatment, and rehabilitation. In addition to ground-up, outpatient building, expansion of inpatient hospital facilities also remains a priority as investors and stakeholders understand the need to bring their facilities to state-of-the-art levels.

The Health Care Problem Tennessee is Facing: Nashville’s Underserved Population

While the health care industry in Nashville has had significant financial growth over the past five years, there is still a large population of Middle Tennessee that is underserved by health care services.

An estimated 1.5 million people live in rural Tennessee and the Tennessee Hospital Association 2017 Rural Impact Report reports that they are currently being served by

• 61 rural hospitals
• 15 critical access hospitals

But these numbers are on a downhill trend, not just in Middle Tennessee but also throughout the country. In the past three years, six rural hospitals have closed in Tennessee, leaving at least three communities in the state without a local hospital or access to emergency care. While the National Rural Health Association estimates that another 683 rural hospitals are at risk of closing through the U.S.

Rural hospitals often operate at narrow margins and 35% are reported to operate at a financial loss. This results from the fact that rural hospitals experience a lower volume of patients and serve patients that tend to be older, poorer, sicker, and who live in states that do not have expanded Medicaid programs, which begs the question of how much people are aware of the programmes and medicaid office locations to be able to avail their services.