Medicine at the Mall

"It's much more expensive to build parking here on campus compared to just using this space that's already available at the mall," Pinson says.

On top of that, the development of a second campus, regardless of its location, addressed two challenges. For one, growing at nearly 300,000 square feet a year, the main Vanderbilt campus, with 832 licensed beds, is destined to become landlocked, so moving outpatient services to another site adds room for continued growth. For another, developing the second campus shows Vanderbilt's commitment to outreach.

"To the extent that we move out from our home base and take our programs closer to the community and make it easier for them to get access, I think that fits well with our mission," Pinson says.

One of the nation's most successful medical malls was started in the mid-1990s when a Jackson, MS, physician recruited University of Mississippi Medical Center to convert a desolate shopping center into a healthcare hub for the city's urban poor. Today, the Jackson Medical Mall houses more than 30 clinics and other medical services, along with restaurants, educational institutions, and human services organizations.

Since then, at least 50 medical malls have emerged across the country, Hunter says, with more on the way. On behalf of Prince George's County in Maryland, Hunter's firm studied the feasibility of converting four underperforming shopping centers into medical malls to increase access to healthcare services for inner-city residents. Such projects might reduce the burden on the county-owned hospital, which is overtaxed by patients using its emergency department for services that could be providing in an outpatient setting.

Hunter has proposed a public forum to let county residents, healthcare workers and other stakeholders discuss the idea. At Vanderbilt, officials also were concerned about how the public would react to its idea of moving services away from the hospital.

"As it turned out, the community viewed this mall as an underdeveloped area, so we have had remarkably positive response from our community for our investment in this area," Pinson says. "In fact, property values all around this mall have gone up."

That probably reflects the influx of people expected when Vanderbilt becomes the anchor tenant, filling two levels of the mall, a five-story office tower, and a big-box space at the 55-acre shopping center.

Some staff members worried about being removed from the hospital hub, but that dissipated when the new campus' scope became clear. "The warmth of the faculty and staff to this idea has increased to the point where those people who are going now view themselves as fortunate that they are getting to go," he says.