Houston's Texas Children's Hospital Plans Austin Expansion With Outpatient Care Sites

SOUTH AUSTIN, TX — The elite Houston-based Texas Children's Hospital is expanding into Austin as part of a planned network of outpatient care facilities, according to a published report.

The hospital plans to open four pediatric urgent-care clinics, three pediatric specialty clinics, 18 pediatric primary-care practices and two maternal-fetal medicine practices over the next five years, officials said on Wednesday as reported by the Houston Chronicle.

The first facility to open under that ambitious plan will be an urgent-care clinic in South Austin scheduled for a launch next spring.

"This expansion reflects both an opportunity and a need," Dr. Mark Kline, Texas Children's physician-in-chief, told the Chronicle. "It'll be an entrance into a market where we haven't had a presence and a benefit to Austin of our integrated and wholistic pediatric-care model that we think is second to none."

Texas Children's has been a Texas Medical Center institution for 63 years, and has since expanded across both greater Houston and throughout Texas since the mid-1990s, the newspaper noted. The facility also has pediatric HIV/AIDS clinics in numerous countries in the developing world, according to the report.

The Chronicle reported Kline as saying that while hospital leaders are "open to the possibility" of building a Texas Children's hospital in Austin, there are no immediate plans on the horizon. Such a hospital would emerge "after we've implemented this five-year plan," he told the newspaper.

For now, the plan calls for implementing the outpatient strategy and "reassess as we go," Kline was quoted as saying.

Pediatric in-patient needs in Austin are served by Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas, a well-regarded but smaller hospital owned by the Seton Healthcare Family and affiliated with the University of Texas-Austin's new medical school, as the newspaper notes. The 10-year-old hospital is licensed for 248 beds and boasts the only Level 1 pediatric trauma center in the central part of the state, according to the report.

The plans by Texas Children's Hospital officials took Dell leaders by surprise, according to the report: "Having just been notified about the plans, we look forward to gaining a better understanding of them," chief of external and academic affairs Greg Hartman said in a statement. "Seton and Dell continually seek to improve health care in our community, and we hope Texas Children's will also commit to better care for our youngest patients and their families - care that's based here in Austin, and stays here in Austin."

Eschewing the idea of competition, Kline painted a picture of complementary services in the throes of the medical system's expansion. He told the Chronicle the two hospital systems would make "excellent partners" operating in a "symbiotic relationship." He added that doctors would refer patients needing hospitalization to Dell under the Austin hospital's policy granting admitting privileges to both academic and private practice doctors, according to the report.

>>> Read the full story at Houston Chronicle

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