HCA to Break Ground on Route 50 Emergency Center

Hospital Corporation of America, commonly called HCA, last week announced plans to break ground this summer on a $10 million freestanding emergency center that will eventually be part of a 164-bed hospital.

HCA’s schedule calls for the 9,600-square-foot emergency center, StoneSpring Emergency Center, to open in the middle of 2013 and for the hospital, StoneSpring Medical Campus, to open in December 2015.

The announcement comes a little more than two years after the long, ugly battle between HCA and Inova Loudoun Hospital over HCA’s proposal to construct a hospital next to the ended. That’s when rivals filled the county boardroom and the auditorium during public hearings to make the case for or against the Broadlands site, about five miles from Loudoun Hospital’s Lansdowne campus. When the fight began, Loudoun Hospital was not part of Inova Health System, but a stand-alone nonprofit.

After the Loudoun Board of Supervisors denied HCA’s Broadlands proposal in 2007, a lawsuit followed, then another denial in 2009. All throughout that time, opponents of the Broadlands site consistently pushed for a hospital along Route 50. Inova and HCA each purchased parcels in that area—HCA bought the 50-acre site at Gum Spring where they will soon break ground, while Inova purchased a site to the west across from Stone Ridge.

And now construction begins on what should be more convenient emergency services for people living along that corridor or in Brambleton or Loudoun Valley Estates.

“Loudoun County officials have been clear in saying that the Route 50 corridor lacks adequate emergency care facilities,” said Tim McManus, President of HCA Virginia’s Northern Virginia market and CEO of Reston Hospital Center, in a press release. “By building StoneSpring Emergency Center, we’re responding to that identified need, improving access to care for residents, and accelerating the development of our Route 50 medical campus.”  

Key to HCA’s plans is the fact that it obtained authorization from the state—called a Certificate of Public Need, or COPN—to build a facility with 164 beds in Loudoun.

HCA plans to build 12 bays at StoneSpring Emergency Center as well as house a CT scanner and other equipment needed to diagnose and treat moderate to serious injuries and illnesses. Services will be available 24 hours a day from physicians, nurses and other caregivers with emergency-care training. The facility will accommodate ambulance traffic and walk-in patients.

At the same time HCA is working on StoneSpring, the Nashville-based company also has planned a $65 million expansion at Reston Hospital, including the addition of four operating rooms, estimated to take two to three years to complete.