Environments for Aging - Fall 2020 - 10

BULLETIN

BULLETIN

Concierge care

The Center for Advanced Healthcare at Brownwood delivers a
multispecialty medical destination in retirement community The
Villages, Fla.

H

ealth and hospitality are at the heart of
The Villages, an active 55+ retirement
community in Central Florida-one of
the largest in the world. Started in the 1980s,
the community of 130,000 residents spans
three counties and comprises a series of
neighborhoods (each with its own name and
identity) as well as three uniquely themed town
centers including Brownwood. The community
is also home to six healthcare centers offering
services from primary care to specialty care
and operated by The Villages Health, the
community-based, primary care-driven health
system. "Our goal in The Villages is to take care
of our residents and do it in a comfortable,
easy, non-stressful way," says Tracy Morse,
head of The Villages design division and one of
three managing family members whose father
began the community.
In May, its health and hospitality offering got
another specialty addition with the opening of
the Center for Advanced Healthcare at Brownwood (CAHB), a 233,973-square-foot multispe10

EFAmagazine.com * Fall 2020

cialty ambulatory healthcare center that was
developed side by side with the connecting
150-room Brownwood Hotel & Spa. "This connection was done from the ground up to offer
a synergy between hospitality and ambulatory
care, with a high emphasis on concierge service," says Sam Burnette, principal and senior
designer at ESa (Earl Swensson Associates;
Nashville), which provided master planning,
architectural and interior design, programming, and construction contract administration
services for both projects.
The outpatient hospital offers a collection
of specialists and services in what Dr. Elliot
Sussman, chairman of The Villages Health,
describes as a "one-stop shop." "There's no
facility like it in the community at large," he
says. "You'd have to go to a major academic
medical center to find all of that co-located."
Adds Burnette, "Having this collection of
outpatient services under one roof versus
multiple destinations throughout The Villages
provides a patient-centered destination of

care in which the various services complement each other."
At the same time, construction of the hotel
was driven by a need for more beds, as The
Villages attracts people near and far for its myriad entertainment and sports events, from golf
tournaments to polo matches to concerts, as
well as conferences. "It's become a destination
city," says Burnette.
The two facilities are brought together on a
shared 32-acre campus. Located on the west
side, the four-story CAHB offers diagnostic
imaging, radiation oncology, and outpatient
labs along with several retail offerings including
an audiology center, health and technology
education center, pharmacy, and coffee shop
on the first floor; an outpatient surgery center
and dermatology practice on the second floor;
and 13 specialist offices with diagnostic and
procedural suites for urology, cardiology, and
neurology on the third and fourth floors. A
shared open-air central courtyard with covered
walkways on the first floor leads to the sevenstory hotel and spa, which includes the conference space and a restaurant.
The project team spent months working
on the master plan and site design to make
the most effective use of the valuable acreage
on the greenfield site. Among the goals were
leveraging the land to carefully locate both

© CHAD MELLON PHOTOGRAPHY

Edited by Anne DiNardo
http://www.EFAmagazine.com
Environments for Aging - Fall 2020

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