A new deal promises to transform beleaguered 100 Oaks Mall. Vanderbilt University Medical Center has signed a lease for just over half of the facility.
The mall’s more successful stores, which open directly out to the parking lot, will remain open. Vanderbilt will take over what has been mostly empty interior retail space on the second and third floors, plus the center’s office tower. Starting in July of next year, those areas will house 20 medical clinics and some of the hospital’s administrative offices. The move will ease congestion at the medical center’s main location. And between the 1-thousand Vanderbilt employees set to work there and the estimated 2-thousand patients who will visit each day, the mall’s stores stand to benefit from increased traffic.
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Vanderbilt University’s Associate Vice Chancellor for Clinical Affairs, Dr. C. Wright Pinson, says the 100 Oaks location will have teaching facilities and will be a second campus for medical graduates and residents.
He also says the new center at 100 Oaks Mall will offer more than the usual clinic.
“This will be a wellness center in that we have a very large exercise and rehabilitation facility that’s going to go in there. So that it won’t just be a standard clinic, but it will be a health and wellness clinic; big emphasis on wellness.”
Vanderbilt University has begun making arrangements for communication between the old and the new locations. Pinson says the 100 Oaks center is being wired for direct electronic communication with the main campus.
“So residents and students and faculty can communicate with each other in conferences even if they’re in the two different locations. Fortunately, it’s only a 15 minute drive back and forth, and we will have a shuttle bus service for people to get back and forth as well.”
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