By Molly Parker
Staff Writer

Correction

The area’s major hospitals are engaged in a game of one-upmanship as they angle for prime locations in neighborhoods that are expected to bustle with the population boom forecasted for the next few decades.

Last year, Trident Health System purchased 20 acres near the Cane Bay High School in the epicenter of three planned neighborhoods in Berkeley County, Cane Bay, Parks of Berkeley and Carnes Crossroads.

It plans to build a medical complex near the Summerville and Goose Creek communities that offers convenient services to the immediate area.

In mid-September, Roper St. Francis Healthcare purchased 66 acres just a few miles away.

With plans to build a similar office complex near the intersection of U.S. Highway 17A and U.S. Highway 176, it is the first business to solidify a proposal to move into the neighborhood now under development by The Daniel Island Co.

“They’re trying to get into our backyard, imagine that,” said Jim Rardin, vice president of development for Hospital Corp. of America, Trident’s parent company, as he discussed hospital growth at Trident’s main campus where he works in North Charleston.

Mark Robinson, the hospital’s chief operating officer, said the recent moves are all about health systems gaining ground where people will be living.

“It’s a lot of jockeying for position,” he said. “It’s a lot of understanding … what people are doing and where they’re living. That’s why you see Roper buying that land, and you see Trident doing the same thing.”

The Urban Land Institute estimates some 1.1 million new residents will move to South Carolina by the year 2030, and that more than a quarter of those people will find a home in the Charleston region.

With few alternatives inside the landlocked peninsula, it’s only natural that hospital beds would sprawl with the shifting population, away from the downtown medical cluster and into the neighborhoods. Whether they need a dose of penicillin or a CT scan, people are inclined to pick the hospital nearest their home.

“Since we’re a community that can’t go up, we’re getting larger and larger and pushing farther and farther out,” said Doug Bowling, vice president for system development at Roper

St. Francis.

That’s not exactly a new trend, but it appears to be a continuing one. In 1996, two years before Roper and St. Francis Hospital merged, the historic St. Francis moved from the downtown medical cluster to its current West Ashley location.

The historic Roper hospital is still downtown and will remain there for the foreseeable future, Bowling said. But he said the hospital is in the process of shifting bed licenses from the downtown to its suburban campuses. The licenses are regulated by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control. 

“It’s a health care trend nationally for hospitals to move services to where the population centers are,” Bowling said.

The recent $24 million, 40,000-square-foot expansion to the West Ashley campus, slated for completion next spring, includes the addition of 65 new acute-care beds. Fifty of those bed licenses were moved from the downtown hospital, meaning only 15 are new.

Likewise, Roper St. Francis will transfer another 50 beds from downtown to its planned 85-bed Mount Pleasant hospital expected to open in November 2010.

Hospitals are not unlike other businesses angling for the best position to meet growing demands, though they have to deal with more red tape. DHEC’s Certificate of Need program regulates bed licenses and any hospital project costing more than $600,000 to prevent runaway medical costs related to unnecessary construction and duplication of health care facilities and services in a particular region.

DHEC awarded first opening rights to East Cooper Regional Medical Center, already headquartered in Mount Pleasant, for the second hospital it is planning to build on 55 acres next to its existing campus near the intersection of U.S. Highway 17 North and Interstate 526.

Over the last few years, the hospitals have collectively sunk tens of millions of dollars into completing new construction and renovation projects and buying real estate. Roper also is planning to build a 24,000-square-foot medical office building near Shem Creek.

Along with plans to build a new office complex in Berkeley County, Trident has already spent more than $100 million on upgrade projects during the last seven years, Rardin said, including a $60 million expansion of the North Charleston hospital’s emergency room and intensive care unit in 2002. 

But even with all the maneuvering to the suburbs, Bowling said, the medical cluster made up of Roper St. Francis and the Medical University of South Carolina will remain downtown.

That grouping is, after all, part of the historic fabric of the city, noted Roper St. Francis spokeswoman Margaret Mullins. To be sure, both hospitals are pumping a substantial amount of money into construction projects there as well.

MUSC is expected to begin seeing heart and vascular and digestive disease patients early next year at its new seven-story medical tower with a glass façade designed to look like a sail, a nod to Charleston’s nautical roots, and with the amenities of a hotel. The patient tower, adjoining four-story diagnostic center and nearby power plant cost a combined $386 million to build and occupies the equivalent of 16 football fields.

In May 2006, Roper opened its new $77.4 million heart and vascular patient tower that serves as the entrance to its downtown hospital.

“We went through a period of some pretty good population growth over the last five years. I think it slowed a little maybe this year, but we’re still a primary retirement destination, and we continue to see job and population growth, but we had not had an expansion of health care services for many, many years,” Bowling said. “We’re just catching up.”

Molly Parker is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her directly at mparker@setcommedia.com.  

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