
Jacksonville will end a three-and-a-half-year stretch without a hospital when Unity Health’s newest facility starts seeing patients as expected next month.
The city of nearly 30,000 residents hasn’t had a hospital or emergency department since Allegiance Health Management Inc. of Shreveport abruptly closed its North Metro Medical Center in August 2019 after years of financial struggles.
Unity Health of Searcy stepped in and worked with the city and Allegiance in late 2020 to acquire the hospital and two buildings for $7.7 million. Unity spent $36 million to reopen the hospital, and held a grand opening event last week.
The hospital has a 13-bed emergency department and a 24-bed inpatient behavioral health unit for adults. Unity Health-Jacksonville, as it was christened, will also have a lab and a pharmacy and offer diagnostic imaging, including CT scans, MRIs, mammography and X-rays.
“It’s huge for our community” and the Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville, said Mayor Jeff Elmore. “Jacksonville has been underserved in the past several years when it comes to health care.”
Residents had to travel to Sherwood for the nearest hospital with an emergency department.
“And now to have a state-of-the-art emergency room and hospital, along with mental care, … it’s going to be great for our citizens,” Elmore said.
The opening of the hospital’s first floor, covering 75,000 SF, is the first phase of the renovation project, said Mark Amox, president and CEO of Unity Health, as he and Kevin Burton, the administrator of the hospital, showed off the hospital to a reporter before the grand opening.

“This is the right thing to do for the community, and that’s really what we’re about, is serving the community,” Amox said.
Phase two of the project will be the build-out of the hospital’s second floor. “We are in the design phase of that right now,” Amox said.
It will take another five to six months to determine what services are needed there, and the build-out will be done over the next two years.
But the opening of the facility comes at one of the worst times financially for hospitals and health systems, according to Kaufman Hall of Chicago, which advises health care and higher education organizations and collects data from more than 900 American hospitals.
“Last year was the worst financial year for hospitals and health systems since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to a Jan. 30 news release from Kaufman Hall.
About half of U.S. hospitals finished the year with a negative margin as growth in expenses outpaced revenue increases, the news release said.
Unity Health-Jacksonville, however, expects to be in the black by its second year. “If you have good access to care and you provide [patients] with an exceptional experience, the rest takes care of itself,” Amox said.
Strong Balance Sheet
Unity Health had a strong balance sheet during the pandemic, Amox said. “And that’s really what allowed us to invest almost $40 million in this facility,” he said.
The health system, which has more than 2,300 employees and three other hospitals, used cash from its reserves to pay for the Jacksonville hospital.
Unity Health decided to focus on behavioral health at the Jacksonville hospital because there’s a need for the service in the community and “there’s appropriate reimbursement for behavioral health,” Amox said.
Between the emergency department and behavioral health, the hospital should be able to support itself, “if we’re smart about it, and we don’t grow too fast,” he said.
The emergency department and behavioral health are also easier places to control costs, as the expenses for those services aren’t as high as orthopedics, which sometimes requires implants, or cancer treatment that can require expensive oncology drugs.

Burton, the administrator, also said the management of the imaging department will be key. He plans to work with the area doctors to have their patients sent to the hospital for imaging services. “So if we do a good job of managing those relationships and being able to get their patients in and out, at the end, we’ll build up a good volume,” Burton said.
Behavioral Health
Unity’s behavioral health unit is expected to be filled to capacity when the hospital opens. “It’s a massive need right now,” Amox said.
The 13,500-SF unit is for adults in crisis and who might be having suicidal ideations. Those patients will be admitted for a three- to five-day stay, and then they can be discharged for outpatient care at Unity’s Jacksonville building.
Burton said community leaders have said that behavioral health was in their top three needs for the city. “The Air Force Base specifically brought this up over and over again: We need help on the mental health side,” he said.
The unit was designed to keep the patients and staff members safe. It doesn’t have furniture that could be picked up and thrown, and the patient rooms have been designed to make it difficult for patients to hurt themselves.
“Every primary care physician we talked to around here is telling us that this is where we’re going to see an explosion in this unit,” Burton said. “They think the ED will be busy, obviously. But they have patients that are already going to need it, right now. They’re having to send them to Little Rock or in some cases even farther, because you can’t get a bed in Little Rock.”
Emergency Department
Amox said he wasn’t sure how many emergency room patients the hospital will see during a month. He said that typically when a hospital opens there’s a surge of patients, but that number declines. “So we expect it to be really busy for the first month or two and then level off,” Amox said. “The question is, where does that level off at?”
The previous hospital saw about 30-40 patients a day in its emergency room. “We’ll be here to take care of whatever shows up to our door,” Amox said. The hospital will employ about 110 people.
The nurses’ station is the first thing to greet a patient rushed into the emergency room from an ambulance, which saves time when deciding to wheel a victim to the trauma room or imaging department.
“This was actually designed by an emergency department nurse,” Burton said. “We had our former director in Searcy who worked with the architects to lay this out to where nurses can be as efficient as possible, which is great for the nurses, but also, again, seconds matter.”
The design of the hospital is also about the patient’s care. “No one likes getting put in a wheelchair, wheeled across the campus to have a CT done,” Burton said. “Here, we’re taking you 15 feet and you’re where you need to be.”
Taggart Architects of North Little Rock designed the building, and the contractor was David Paul Builders Inc. of Searcy. The engineer was Bernhard of Metairie, Louisiana.
The hospital will have five inpatient rooms. Unity Health has transfer agreements to send patients to CHI St. Vincent and Baptist Health if they need to be moved.
“It’s really about creating that system of care and being that anchor point here for Jacksonville,” Amox said.
Another plus for the hospital is that it won’t be operated by an out-of-state company. “There’s that local touch that was missing before,” said Burton, who lives a few miles from the hospital. “We are part of this community. … We live here and these are our people.”