The nation’s largest health-care technology trade group has agreed to lease 25,000 square feet or more in a proposed Nashville Medical Trade Center downtown, giving a major boost to the project’s credibility. The 28,000-member Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society plans to use its space, part of an eventual 15-story medical trade center, as a showroom to demonstrate high- tech clinical systems and other products.
“Right now, if you look at health-care information technology, that’s really the sweet spot of growth in the health-care industry,” said Bill Winsor, chief executive officer of Market Center Management, the Dallas developer of the planned $250-million building.
The lease gives the Nashville Medical Trade Center—to be built in and atop the existing Nashville Convention Center— a solid starting point, Sean Jackson, an industry analyst at Avondale Partners LLC in Nashville, told the Tennessean.com.
With 490 corporate members, including Microsoft and Google, Healthcare Information (based in Chicago) is the largest association of its kind focused exclusively on information technology for health care.
Signing a major new tenant may give the proposed Nashville center an edge in a three-way race with two other medical trade centers in the planning stages for New York and Cleveland. Such centers showcase a variety of medical products from hospital beds and imaging equipment to computer software.
Market Center Management is negotiating a master lease with Nashville officials to take over the current convention center space after the new Music City Center convention hall gets built. The developer wants to expand the 22-year-old convention center to about 1.5 million square feet by adding 12 new floors above the current building. Plans call for the medical trade center to open in early 2013.
