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Health Care

Hospital Chief: High-dollar Projects In Works

By Cece Nunn, posted Jan 22, 2025
Scotts Hill Medical Center will be part of a Novant Health campus closer to patients in the northern part of New Hanover County. (Rendering c/o Novant Health)
Ongoing growth is the prognosis for Novant Health’s activities this year in the Cape Fear region, a top official at Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center said in a recent interview.

Construction continues on its largest current project, Scotts Hill Medical Center, a three-story, 250,000-square-foot community hospital with a surgical focus. The overall spending on the Scotts Hill medical campus, which includes the upcoming 66-bed hospital and a 60,000-square-foot medical office building that opened in December, is likely to top $325 million, said Ernie Bovio, president of Novant Health NHRMC and the Novant Coastal Region.

“Our strategic capital investments are designed to create capacity and access to our hospitals and to our physician services and to keep up with the growth in the region,” he said. “We’re the regional referral center for the surrounding 12 counties and the amount of patients that we’re taking care of from outside our primary service areas is pretty significant.”

In the case of the Scotts Hill campus, the hospital is expected to help meet that growing demand by 2026.

“We’re about 18 months away from that facility being completed,” Bovio said Dec. 20.

On Novant NHRMC’s main campus on South 17th Street in Wilmington, Novant officials are proposing a 120-bed cardiovascular tower, but construction starting on that major capital expenditure would be several years away, he said.

“It’s a multi-faceted project, and it’s probably the last major expansion that would exist on this (17th Street) campus to create more capacity,” Bovio said, adding that Novant is also working on a master plan for the 17th Street campus.

A new tower on 17th Street could mean a change for the former Cape Fear Memorial Hospital facility, now the Novant Health Orthopedic Hospital that also holds an emergency room. As of Dec. 20, officials were still piecing together what to do with the aging hospital at 5301 Wrightsville Ave. in Wilmington. The ER component is a major consideration, Bovio said.

“We can’t absorb that emergency room volume in our other emergency departments, so we have to have a solution for that, potentially a free-standing emergency department,” Bovio said. “But we’re seriously looking at how do we maintain the existing facility, update it and use it for patient care?”

In addition to the ER at the ortho hospital on Wrightsville Avenue and the one at the main campus on 17th Street, Novant has three other emergency rooms in the region – at Scotts Hill, Novant Health Pender Medical Center in Burgaw and Novant Health Brunswick Medical Center in Bolivia. As of December last year, Bovio anticipated that Novant’s emergency departments would end up with a total of 210,000 visits.

Bovio said Novant’s two Michael Jordan Family Medical Clinics in Wilmington, along with its 38-foot mobile health unit, the Community Care Cruiser, will help absorb some of those emergency visits for those who might not need emergency care but whose only options (because they don’t have insurance) are Novant Health’s area ERs.

In early 2021, Novant Health announced that Wilmington native and NBA champion Michael Jordan had donated $10 million to open two Novant Health Michael Jordan Family Medical Clinics in New Hanover County.

The first clinic opened in April last year. The second clinic, at Princess Place Drive and North 30th Street, is expected to open this year. “Modeled after the Greenfield Street clinic, this clinic will have the same goal of being a safe place where the community can come and ask for help,” according to a previous Business Journal story.

Aside from Scotts Hill, additional work in the Wilmington area will take place in the city’s midtown at the former Verizon office building, 3601 Converse Road. Novant Health is installing outpatient clinics on two floors of the three-story building, acquired by health care real estate firm Flagship Health Properties for $21 million in September.

On Eastwood Road, another Novant Health medical office building is set to be completed by the spring, Bovio said.

Novant Health acquired the previously county-owned New Hanover Regional Medical Center for nearly $2 billion in 2021. As part of the sale, Novant agreed to spend no less than $600 million during a 10-year period following the sale on “commercially reasonable routine capital expenditures of the healthcare business,” according to the asset purchase agreement.

The system also agreed to spend at least $2.5 billion to implement all projects identified in NHRCM’s strategic plan, a Business Journal story stated in 2022.

In all so far, Bovio said, Novant has committed more than $600 million to projects that are either completed or currently underway.
He also outlined some of the work going on in the Wilmington area’s other two counties. In Brunswick County, “we’re approved for an ambulatory surgery center in Leland. We’re breaking ground on that in the springtime,” Bovio said.

As part of NHRMC’s sale, Novant agreed to take over New Hanover Regional’s longtime arrangement to manage Pender Medical Center, which opened in 1951. Then, Pender officials agreed in September 2023 to sell the hospital to Novant, which pledged to invest $50 million in improvements to the hospital over 10 years as payment.

Novant is in the process of upgrading the Pender hospital, in part by adding services and specialists, Bovio said.

“We just hired a seasoned, experienced med peds hospitalist (for Pender) that’s recruiting a partner, and he has the skill set to keep more patients there,” Bovio said, explaining that the “med peds hospitalist” is a board-certified internal medicine pediatric-trained hospitalist.

“We’re also going to have some more of our specialists rotating up there (at the Pender hospital) so they can maintain patients in that community,” he added.

Bovio said adding specialists and services to the Brunswick and Pender hospitals, such as a cath lab, MRI and expanded ER in Brunswick, helps “keep patients closer to home.”

Correction: The medical office building that opened in December on the Scotts Hill medical campus is 60,000 square feet. An earlier version of this story included the incorrect size.
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