Murfreesboro Medical Clinic Expands Services With New Facility
Murfreesboro Medical Clinic marked its 60th anniversary in 2009, and the community health-care mainstay – a physician-owned group practice – continues to grow.
“We’re looking to expand to better serve our community by bringing in more physicians,” says MMC Chief Executive Officer Joey Peay. “We’re seeing quite a bit of need in adult primary care, and we're coupling that with some medical and surgical subspecialties where the needs arise.”
To make room for those new physicians, MMC opened phase one of its new 200,000-square-foot, three-story office complex on Garrison Drive in 2008. So far, 78,000 square feet of the attractive building are occupied with a surgery center, outpatient rehabilitation, imaging and laboratory services, ophthalmology, gastroenterology, otolaryngology, dermatology and the Comprehensive Breast Center, a new MMC service line that features breast MRI and minimally invasive biopsy. The remainder of MMC’s medical offerings, including internal medicine and pediatrics, remain for the time being at the Highland Avenue location near downtown where the physician group has served area residents since 1979.
Peay says occupation of the remainder of the new facility will occur gradually, with full occupancy expected in late 2012 or early 2013. The Garrison Drive building is located in the shadow of the new Middle Tennessee Medical Center, under construction and slated to open in October 2010. More and more medical office buildings and outpatient facilities are congregating around the new hospital site, thus creating a vibrant health-care complex that’s easily accessible from Interstate 24 via the Medical Center Parkway exit.
Peay says MMC’s new facility “gives us such an opportunity to utilize our space better.”
As an example, he says space simply isn’t allocated for the storage of patients’ paper charts, a square-footage hog in medical buildings of old. “Now paper charts are going out the window,” he says, noting that MMC completed the scanning of all its paper charts and the implementation of electronic medical records in 2008.
“This building also gives us the opportunity to incorporate new technologies,” he adds.
MMC has more than 60 physicians and about 425 employees in all, handling more than 21,000 patient visits monthly. While many employers have been reducing staff during the challenging economy, MMC has been in hiring mode.
“For the most part, we’ve been creating jobs,” Peay says. “We’ve been blessed that, as the economic times have been rough, we have not seen a dramatic decrease in patients. We’ve actually seen those numbers remain relatively stable.”
To enhance convenience for patients, the group practice has opened its first retail drop-in clinic called MMC NOW!, located inside a Murfreesboro Kroger grocery store. Peay says MMC NOW! represents “a branding and a concept that we are going to expand.”
