Nashville, TN: In Great Health
Nashville builds on its status as the nation’s health industry hub.
In 1968, in a small house on the edge of Centennial Park in Nashville, TN, a vision of a better health care model was born.
Beginning with the launch of what is now HCA Healthcare, the largest for-profit hospital company in the U.S., the subsequent work of countless other pioneers, entrepreneurs, researchers and caregivers has made Nashville one of the country’s most dynamic health care hubs.
The region is home to more than 500 health-related companies, ranging from hospitals and outpatient treatment centers to clinics, labs, research facilities, medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical firms and health tech entrepreneurs, who are exploring software to create better surgical scheduling or find out how AI can improve hospital logistics and patient outcomes.
This once-nascent industry today is Nashville’s largest employer and leading economic driver, providing more than 327,000 jobs and a staggering $67 billion annually to the local economy.
“Nashville’s entrepreneurial and collaborative spirit sets it apart,” says Apryl Childs-Potter, president of the Nashville Health Care Council (NHCC). “This is where industry pioneers come together, through high-level thinking and problem-solving, to bring the principles of business and economies of scale to our nation’s health care system.”
Secret Sauce
This unique “secret sauce” – combining competition, innovation and collaboration – has uniquely fueled the Nashville health industry’s phenomenal, ongoing growth and development.
“While Nashville’s top executives may compete with one another in the broad market,” Childs-Potter says, “they respect, collaborate and mentor one another within our community, making this an exceptional place for businesses to thrive.”
As Nashville’s health care industry has become a local behemoth, it has also expanded well outside its local roots. The NHCC notes that an ecosystem of 500 health care companies doing business in Nashville generates some $95 billion in annual revenue and more than 500,000 jobs, making Nashville’s impact felt on an even larger scale. Another 400 professional service firms in the region provide expertise – including legal, accounting, finance and design – to the health care industry.
“Nashville has grown right along our health care industry,” Childs-Potter says. “As health care continues to grow and diversify in Nashville, it draws attention and talent from all over the world. In health care, all roads lead to Nashville. It’s all right here.”
Global Impact
The NHCC, which has been serving as facilitator, convenor and promoter of Nashville’s health care sector for 25 years, is expanding those borders even further, leading trade missions to countries around the world.
Among those finding the road to Nashville are a growing number of businesses that provide health care-related services.
HST Pathways helps ambulatory surgery centers with innovative cloud-based software for surgical scheduling, inventory management, clinical workflows, medical coding and insurance. The company decided to relocate its headquarters from California to Nashville in 2021.
Advanced Correctional Healthcare, the largest health care provider in the country to county jails, relocated to Franklin from Illinois in 2021.
And Jan Schlueter, co-founder of DARVIS (Data Analytic Real-World Visual Intelligence System) moved his business, his family, a dog and a horse to the area in 2021 after being a part of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center Project Healthcare cohort in 2020. While the company does major projects for clients like the U.S. Postal Service and retail companies, its platform using AI to assist health care facilities’ efficiency and productivity is an important part of what brought it to Nashville.
”It was fate or destiny or something,” Schlueter jokes. “But as we got familiar with the growth of Nashville, the culture, we just fell in love.”
Bioscience, a rapidly growing segment of the health care industry nationally, is also having an impact locally. August Bioservices, for example, has been consistently growing its injectables manufacturing and research business over the past several years in Nashville.
A report by JLL recently ranked the Nashville Region among the top 10 markets in the country for its potential to nurture a biosciences segment, thanks to its quality of life.
“For an emerging life sciences market to reach full maturity, talent and momentum must combine and synthesize,” the report notes. “The best way to ensure that is to provide the foundation for an appealing long-term lifestyle for young professionals, so that they will put down roots and spend their prime career years nurturing the local life sciences ecosystem.
Ranking in Research
Also contributing greatly to health care is Vanderbilt University. In fact, the university and its VU Medical Center has ranked among the top 12 U.S. universities for securing research funding from the National Institutes of Health.
The NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, presented Vanderbilt and VUMC with more than $503 million in fiscal year 2022 to conduct research in a variety of biomedical areas.
“Vanderbilt’s biomedical researchers are among the top in the nation working on solving some of the world’s greatest challenges,” said Padma Raghavan, Vanderbilt University vice provost for research and innovation, in a news release.
Funding from NIH is distributed to Vanderbilt’s School of Nursing, School of Medicine Basic Sciences and 15 clinical sciences departments.
One of the university’s most recent efforts was leading the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, with research that included a nationwide study of convalescent plasma as a treatment for the disease. Vanderbilt also led the development of human monoclonal antibodies as a potential treatment for COVID.
Today, Vanderbilt conducts research in many areas, including cell and developmental biology, biochemistry, molecular physiology, biophysics, pharmacology, pediatrics, anesthesiology and urology. Vanderbilt University ranked No. 13 among national universities on U.S. News & World Report’s 2023 Best Colleges list.
The publication cited Vanderbilt’s “renowned research opportunities, cutting-edge facilities and collaborations with leading institutions worldwide.”
Kevin Litwin contributed to this article.
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