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Greenville Business Magazine

Bon Secours St. Francis Breaks Ground on Simpsonville Medical Facility

Dec 08, 2020 02:40PM ● By David Dykes
By Liv Osby

While countless businesses are shuttering amid the coronavirus pandemic, Bon Secours St. Francis Health System has just broken ground on a new medical facility in Simpsonville.

Slated to open in the spring of 2022, the new $39 million project on Grandview Drive near Interstate 385 will mean access to new medical specialties as well as diagnostic services such as X-ray, ultrasound, CT and MRI for residents of the area, according to Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Marcus Blackstone.

The 41,450-square-foot facility also will include a retail pharmacy and will consolidate existing practices and add new ones to offer primary care, cardiology, obstetrics and gynecology, orthopedics, behavioral health and phlebotomy.

"We know there is still a significant number of people who don’t have primary care and access to other services," Blackstone told Greenville Business Magazine. "This gives patients access."

The new medical offices will serve the growing Simpsonville and Fountain Inn communities, as well as surrounding Laurens and Greenwood counties, he said.

It was the region’s growth over the last 10 years that convinced officials to locate the new facility there, he said.

"After our change in leadership in late spring of 2019, one of the things we started looking at was where are we going from here," he said. "We had already looked at multiple areas and Simpsonville rose to the top. It’s one of those areas that just continued to grow."

Feedback from patients and doctors, who wanted diagnostic capabilities in the area, also played a role, he said.

"As an organization, we didn’t have diagnostics in that area," he said, noting the closest was at the St. Francis Millennium Campus in Mauldin.

Plans were on the books for the new center before the pandemic hit, though they were temporarily halted, Blackstone said.

"That conversation was well involved before Covid started. But from mid-March to June, discussions about everything else shut down," he said. "But once we started learning how to manage Covid, we knew we’d get on the other side of that and started our strategy discussions back up."

Though hospitals faced some tough financial times in the first few months of the pandemic as services were canceled, the project continued.

"It’s one of the advantages of being part of a big system," he said.

St. Francis already has five practices in Simpsonville that will move to the new facility, Blackstone said.

"It really made sense to put it all together on one campus," he added. "The other thing was to be able to grow the practices we already had and add in some others."

The new center will likely provide enough capacity for double the patients seen now, he said, and new staff will be added.

"We’re constantly recruiting from a provider side," he said. "There will be additions."