Competition in East Texas?

Texas Business reports:  Temple-based Scott & White Healthcare plans to build a new hospital in College Station.

The health care entity has acquired approximately 98 acres of undeveloped land that will be the home for a new 143-bed acute care hospital project.

The property was purchased from Weingarten Realty Investors and College Station ISD.

The five-story, 320,000-square-foot Scott & White Hospital-College Station will be located at the intersection of Texas Hwy 6 and Rock Prairie Road.

Construction is scheduled to begin early next year.

An adjacent 75,000 square-foot clinic is also proposed and will be built by a third party developer in conjunction with the hospital.

The hospital and ambulatory facility will be built within 90 days of each other, with a projected completion date of the summer of 2013 for both projects.

Scott & White Hospital-College Station will open initially with 119 beds and can be expanded to accommodate another 24 beds when the need arises.

“This new hospital brings Scott & White’s model of a seamless, continuum of health care—outpatient to inpatient to outpatient—to the Brazos Valley,” said Scott & White chief executive Alfred B. Knight in a prepared statement.  “Our focus on the highest quality, coordinated, cost-efficient health care is unrelenting.”

Scott & White Hospital-College Station will house an emergency department,  cardiac services including cath labs, neonatal intensive care unit, comprehensive cancer services, operating rooms, maternity services suites, endoscopic procedure suites, interoperative robotics and other specialty services, all supported by a pharmacy, comprehensive state-of-the-art imaging technology and other diagnostic capabilities.

“Patient demand for the excellent ambulatory care Scott & White has provided in the Brazos Valley sparked the building of our new clinic on Arrington Road,” said Scott & White College Station region executive William Rayburn in a prepared statement.  “Scott & White Hospital-College Station will be an open staff model hospital and will complement and support both clinics, while enhancing our ability to better serve patients through seamless handoffs between the clinic and the hospital.”

Jason Jennings has been named chief executive officer for Scott & White Hospital-College Station. Jennings previously served as chief operating officer for Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center, one of the 12 hospitals and hospital partners in the Scott & White Healthcare System.   He is a graduate of Texas A&M University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences.  He also holds master’s degrees in physical therapy from the University of Texas Medical Branch and in business administration from the University of Texas at Tyler.

 Scott & White Healthcare is a non-profit collaborative health care system established in 1897 in Temple.  The system, one of the nation’s largest multi-specialty group practices, provides personalized, comprehensive, high-quality health care enhanced by medical education and research.  The system’s Temple campus serves as the principal clinical four-year teaching facility for the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine.  Scott & White Healthcare staff of 12,000 includes more than 800 physicians and scientists and nearly 400 specialized health care providers. The system’s 12 hospitals or hospital partners include Scott & White Hospital-Brenham, and more than 60 clinic locations throughout Central Texas, including Scott & White College Station Clinic on University Drive and Scott & White College Station Clinic-Arrington Road.