Project Details:

The project involves the renovation and build out of the Turner Tower at the Regional Medical Center of Memphis (“The MED”) located in a severely distressed census tract in Memphis, Tennessee. The Turner Tower, an 82,000 square foot, six story building constructed in 1992, is being renovated to relocate, expand, and modernize its current inpatient rehabilitation unit of 20 beds to 30 beds increasing its day bed capacity by 3,500 days or 175 patients per year; create a new Outpatient Ambulatory Surgery Unit resulting in the provision of an additional 1,400 surgeries over a five year period and an increased capacity of more than 700 outpatient surgeries annually; add 24 private-room beds for adult acute care patients resulting in an additional day bed capacity of 7,884 days or approximately 1,100 patients per year; and the addition of the Vascular Institute which will implement an entirely new service line for The MED.

The MED is an acute care non-profit hospital that has been suffering due to inefficiencies in providing quality care. The MED is often functionally full, the rehabilitation unity bed occupancy rate has been at more than 95 percent for more than five years, and bottlenecks have been occurring at the main surgical site causing delays or postponed surgeries; thus, the need for the renovations. The MED had approximately 212,000 patient encounters in 2012 of which The MED management team estimates that more than 70 percent of these encounters, or 148,400, were Medicaid/TennCare or uninsured patients. The MED is considered the region’s medical safety net facility, providing millions of dollars worth of uncompensated care to its service area.

The MED provides services specifically targeted towards low-income persons which include clinical and radiological imaging services to low-income women at their Breast Care Clinic for early detection of breast cancer; a full continuum of medical and social services at their Adult Special Care Clinic for low-income HIV/AIDS patients; parenting, childbirth, and prenatal services to low-income women through their Centering Pregnancy Program; and they have the Health Loop Primary Network which is a network of four primary care centers located throughout the community in areas with a high concentration of TennCare enrollees or uninsured individuals for convenient, quality healthcare access.