By James T. Hammond
jhammond@scbiznews.com
Published June 24, 2009

When Bon Secours St. Francis Health System opens its new 103,000-square-foot medical office building on Laurens Road, its anchor tenant will be Upstate Cardiology, a 17-physician practice that is moving from Grove Road.

The new St. Francis facility is across the street from the site where it plans to start construction next year on another hospital for its growing Greenville system.

“Our lease was up on Grove Road,” said Upstate Cardiology administrator Ronald Eskew, who described his practice as “close” to St. Francis Health System. “It was just time to go somewhere else.”

“The Millennium Campus is geographically right in the middle of the county,” he said. “Demographically it just seemed like the right place to be.”

Upstate Cardiology has a total staff of about 100 people who will be working in the new facility on Laurens Road. One reason for the move, Eskew said, was the chance to expand from their current 19,000-square-foot facility to 25,000 square feet in the Laurens Road medical office building.

DASCO Companies of Palm Beach Gardens, FL, is the developer and owner of the building. Brasfield & Gorrie is the contractor.

St Francis has big plans for the Millennium campus. For a start, it will lease about half of the new medical office building, from which it will operate educational and health care resources for people with chronic conditions such as diabetes, pulmonary and cardiac diseases.

“Mauldin has in many ways been under served,” said Johnna Reid, the senior vice president for strategic planning at St. Francis. “We will be able to take services into the homes or workplaces of people with chronic diseases. Home health care is important to Bon Secours. That’s how they got started.”

In a presentation to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, the private, non-profit health system said it plans to build a 230,500-square-foot, four-floor hospital at Laurens Road and Innovation Way, across the street from the new medical office building. St. Francis said it would begin construction in January 2010 and hoped to finish the project by late 2011, or early 2012.

For additional information, read the June 22 print edition of GSA Business.