On Kennedy Boulevard, Tampa General CEO envisions a new campus
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Nov 9, 2021

Tampa General Hospital plans to build a freestanding emergency department on West Kennedy Boulevard — the next phase in what its CEO describes as a "mini campus" between South Tampa and the downtown core.

The hospital broke ground on a $35 million, 59-bed acute rehabilitation hospital on the property (bounded by Kennedy Boulevard to the south, North B Street to the north, North Oregon Avenue to the west and North Willow Avenue to the east) in early 2021. The freestanding ED, CEO John Couris told the Tampa Bay Business Journal, will be the next phase of development on the 9-acre property, which Tampa General bought for $12.25 million in 2010.

"We're master planning the other pieces behind those two buildings," Couris said.

The rehab hospital is set to open in the first half of 2022. The freestanding ED, Couris says, will serve multiple needs — including a defensive business strategy.

"This is a defensive mechanism to basically establish a presence in the freestanding market, so it’s harder for a competitor to put a freestanding ED in the city of Tampa," Couris said.

Emergency department visits are any hospital’s primary driver of admissions — and in-patient services are big moneymakers for hospitals. Building freestanding emergency departments close to populations with a high percentage of commercially insured residents has become a business model for many health systems throughout Florida. It helps them gain market share with the most lucrative demographic of potential patients.

Couris says Tampa General’s new freestanding ED — unveiled as part of its $550 million master plan that went public in late September — will also handle overflow traffic from the Davis Islands hospital, which is home to a Level 1 trauma center. Level 1 trauma centers handle the most acute, catastrophic emergency cases, and the freestanding ED will be able to take lower acuity cases, Couris said.

Tampa General is also a safety net hospital, a legal designation that means the hospital takes on a large percentage of patients who are uninsured or unable to pay their medical bills. The freestanding ED and the incremental volume in admissions that results from it could help subsidize the hospital’s unpaid care, Couris said.

But beyond the business case for a freestanding ED, Couris says Tampa General genuinely needs additional capacity.

“Because we are really busy now, we are growing exponentially as a medical center,” he said. “There are some unintended, positive consequences of that, and that’s additional incremental volume.”

Couris became the hospital’s CEO in 2017 and has been bullish on the institution’s role in Tampa Bay’s overall growth. For years, he’s talked of a medical district that extends beyond Tampa General’s Davis Islands campus, into downtown Tampa and the fringes of the urban core. The medical district, he says, is built on Tampa General’s relationship with the University of South Florida. Despite the institutions’ partnership – which was strengthened with a new alliance in 2020 — Tampa doesn’t have the reputation of an academic medical city like Baltimore and Johns Hopkins or Houston, where Texas Medical Center is home to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and several other major facilities.

The Kennedy Boulevard campus, he says, and USF’s Morsani College of Medicine in Water Street represent the district’s unofficial east-west boundaries — “the ends of the barbell,” as Couris sees it. In between are the Davis Islands campus, USF’s Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation, the Tampa General corporate center, a clinical and thematic analytics hub and more.

“We’re starting to layer into the city,” he said.