On San Antonio’s South Side, where residents are generally sicker and have fewer medical facilities to choose from, University Health is creating a campus where it aims to go beyond traditional health care.
The centerpiece is Palo Alto Hospital, which the Bexar County-owned hospital district is building at South Zarzamora Street and Jaguar Parkway, but it’s just one part of the effort.
Next door, it’s constructing a primary care and multispecialty health center that will be home to the district’s Institute for Public Health and behavioral health services for children and adults. It’s working to partner with outside organizations that will help connect patients with housing, food, transportation and job assistance and host classes.
The 60,000-square-foot facility dubbed University Health Vida will have coworking and meeting space for those organizations, a kitchen for classes, a pharmacy, computers for patients to use, a lawn for enjoying a meal or taking an outdoor yoga class and an office for its nonprofit Community First Health Plans. There also will be a driveway with hookups for mobile units such as a blood donation bus, a mobile library or a pet spaying and neutering truck.
The goal is to offer typical health care services while addressing nonmedical aspects of people’s environment and circumstances — the neighborhoods where they live, the housing they occupy, how much money they make, their educational attainment, transportation access, their proximity to grocery stores — that significantly affect their health.
Plans for the $748 million campus spring from the reality that health is about more than blood tests, surgical suites and emergency rooms.
“Social determinants of health is the context in which we live, learn, work, play,” said Carol Huber, vice president of the Institute for Public Health. “For some of us, those determinants have given us a boost, and for others, it’s been a barrier.”
A nagging need
The hospital is to open in 2027 with 166 beds and room to expand to 286. It will have an emergency department, labor and delivery unit, radiology, laboratory, pharmacy, neonatatal intensive care unit and inpatient units. Next door, a 100,000-square-foot medical office building will provide space for appointments with medical and surgical specialists.
The campus will help address nagging needs on the South Side.
A 2022 investigation by the San Antonio Express-News of health inequities found that medical facilities are heavily concentrated in the northern parts of the city, in places where patients generally are healthier and wealthier and providers can collect higher reimbursements from insurance companies. In the southern part of the city, it found, residents have limited access to hospitals, medical specialists and surgical centers.
Most of the emergency care facilities in the area, including full-service trauma hospitals and freestanding emergency centers, are on the North Side. Texas Vista Medical Center, one of just two hospitals serving the South Side, closed in 2023, leaving Mission Trail Baptist Hospital as the only option for residents in the area for now.
A 2023 report by University Health also laid out the disparities between South Bexar County and the county overall.
In neighborhoods on the South Side, which is more heavily Hispanic, the poverty rate is higher, more residents report having a disability of some kind, and there are fewer jobs, grocery stores and accredited child care facilities.
Fewer families have internet access and health insurance. The percentage of families receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and the percentage of people age 25 and older who have less than or equivalent to a high school diploma is nearly twice as high, according to the study.
“In our neighborhood, we have Dollar General and a gas station … if you want processed foods, go right ahead, there is plenty of that,” a participant in a focus group told the district. “If you actually want to get food and groceries you have to drive twenty minutes in town.”
Said another: “We have excellent medical facilities. Unfortunately, they’re all in the North Side, Northwest Side, far North San Antonio, Northeast San Antonio. Nothing in the South Side, Southeast, and what we do have is overcrowded or populated. Long wait, long lines, not accessible to everybody.”
‘New strategies’
Partnering with other organizations, filling prescriptions, providing health care services and hosting classes at a single location will help University Health address some of those difficulties, Huber said. In a pilot program University Health is testing, readmission rates are decreasing for patients who receive help with social services.
“When we talk about nonmedical drivers of health, it’s not just about the end goal of improving health, it’s the end goal of improving education and improving our workforce, because all of those things together ultimately improve the economy and reduce the disparities in this report,” Huber said.
University Health Vida is expected to open late this year with Palo Alto Hospital to follow in about a year. The two buildings are part of a master-planned community called Vida that Southstar is building next to Texas A&M University-San Antonio.
The district can take what works at the South Side campus to its other hospitals and clinics across the county, Huber said, including another hospital it’s planning near the Retama Park horse track in Selma, in the booming Interstate 35 corridor between San Antonio and New Braunfels.
“It’s an opportunity for us to test new strategies, new approaches to how we do this, and then whatever works, we will spread to all of our other sites as space and facilities allow,” she said.
This article was originally published by Madison Iszler for the San Antonio Express-News.