Nashville General opens care centers in Bordeaux

Nashville General Hospital opens primary care and diagnostic centers in the Bordeaux area of North Nashville, its second off-site location.

Nashville Healthcare Center - Bordeaux, which will offer primary care and speciality care similar to the organization's Midtown clinic, Nashville Healthcare Diagnostic Center, will provide imaging services including CT scans, mammography, MRI, ultrasound and x-rays. Both will be located at 4007 Clarksville Highway.

These new centers are an effort to address what leaders of Nashville General are calling a health care desert, and it is part of a larger push to bring more outpatient care to the area.

“By actually having medical services more available to a community with easier access, it can encourage individuals to seek that care,” said Mark Brown, COO of Nashville General Hospital. “The models that we use for our patient population is actually one that focuses on prevention, so coming in for regular visits, monitoring, tracking things like A1C blood sugar, blood pressures, engaging the patient in their own care, focusing on health literacy. That model will be taken to that community.”

Sam Kirk, president of the Bordeaux Business Association, said, “it’s a service whose time has come for this particular area of Nashville. We are basically a health care desert, and the community is extremely excited that [Nashville General Hospital] is bringing that diagnostic center to our area.”

Bordeaux has an aging population with many Medicare users, but it’s being gentrified, said Nashville General CEO Dr. Joseph Webb. The hospital looks to serve the indigent population — as is its original mission — along with paying customers, to offset costs.

“In order to maintain relevance within the community and serve the needs of patient populations throughout the city, we felt the need to expand the footprint and become more viable as a health care entity,” Webb said. “That's what spurred the strategic move to go into Bordeaux.”

Up until 2019, Nashville General only operated out of its campus at 1818 Albion Street, near Meharry Medical College. In 2019, the organization opened Nashville Healthcare Center at 1919 Charlotte Ave., which includes cardiology, acute surgical, orthopedic, urology and women’s health.

Metro Councilmember Jonathan Hall, whose District 1 includes Bordeaux, was critical of Nashville General’s expansion over the past few years. Hall said he would like to see the area be the focus of a healthy living initiative — a $5 million investment from the city to bring more options for fresh food, hospital care and pharmacies to the district. In 2017, Nashville Post reported on a mixed-use retail development slated for Bordeaux, where Nashville Healthcare Diagnostic Center will be located.

“With Nashville General, it's been a touch-and-go relationship,” Hall said. “While I'm excited about the opportunity for this, I'm looking for a lot more.”

Nashville General Hospital was made a part of the charter of the city in 1890, with the commitment to provide health care for the elderly, indigent and young.

More than a century later, the hospital serves more paying patients than those who cannot pay, which is reflective of the community, Webb said.

“What Nashville General has done particularly over the last seven years has been to take a strategic approach, that in order for it to remain financially viable, it needed to go way beyond just being a hospital and providing services to an indigent population, and relying on the 30 percent or 40 percent of its budget coming from the city to survive,” he said.

Dedication Service