Vanderbilt University Medical Center is dipping a toe in West Tennessee. On Tuesday, the academic research institution announced an affiliation agreement with Jackson-Madison County General Hospital.
The 635-bed facility will remain owned and operated by the local government. Hospital officials see partnering with Vanderbilt as a way to improve care for their own patients.
Vanderbilt Health System CEO Wright Pinson says he’d like to see more hard-to-treat cases handled without having to make the trip to his hospital in Nashville.
“All I want are the kinds of cases that we need to have here – the ultra-specialty cases. This is absolutely not about funneling cases into the big city hospitals.”
Vanderbilt has similar agreements already in place with regional medical centers in Cookeville and Columbia. Pinson says Vanderbilt is on a path to creating a network around the state. Among other reasons, Pinson says there’s not much room left for expanding on West End.