Dell Seton Medical Center Will Use Waller Creek's Full Potential

Downtown Austin’s coming Dell Seton Medical Center will be one legendary project. Its incorporation of Waller Creek and Waterloo Park, in particular, will make it a standout medical facility. We learned all about it at our Austin Healthcare event yesterday.

Waller Creek has played a pivotal role in the project’s design and will be a determining factor in its success, our panelists (pictured) say. The campus is centered on a lush, green environment instead of a concrete jungle, Page Architects principal Larry Speck says. This will be one of the first programs to be certified under the Sustainable Sites Initiative.

On selecting a site for the Dell Seton Medical Center, Seton president Greg Hartman says it was a great opportunity to make Waller Creek, a planning nightmare for years, work as an integral part of Downtown. UT had been looking at a campus in that area and was able to connect Seton with some property. “Waller Creek changed the conversation. It was in some ways the spark that made it happen right there,” Greg says.

Pictured: moderator CCRD + wsp president Rick Rome, Larry, Central Health CEO Patricia Young Brown, Greg, Austin Chamber of Commerce SVP Michele Skelding and UT Dell Medical School dean Clay Johnston.

The incorporation of Waller Creek and Waterloo Park into the project’s design supports the contemporary notion of health as including how people live, work and play. Patricia described Waterloo Park and the Dell Seton Medical Center’s relationship as symbiotic. Dell Seton adds value to the park and the park adds value to Dell Seton. And the physical transition between the two is virtually nonexistent.

Unlike its across-the-street neighbor, UMC Brackenridge, Dell Seton will be a teaching hospital. Seton has partnered with Central Health in an affiliation agreement with UT Austin to get the project, which has a firm deadline of May 21, 2017, off the ground.

Clay, pictured above answering a question, says the main focus is making sure that everybody in Travis County has access to excellent care. The first building, concentrated on education, is finished. The next will be a 300k SF research building slated for December completion, which will be connected to the Health Transformation Center by bridge.

Greg (second from the right with Patricia, Larry and Downtown Austin Alliance's Dewitt Peart) describes the partnership with Central Health as entrepreneurial and innovative. “It’s about creating a business together: identifying ways to not only transform healthcare and to think about new ways to do things, but to create new revenue streams to fund that,” he says.

This partnership is symbolic of one that, according to Larry, is important to fostering an entrepreneurial culture where a medical center like this one will thrive. “The ideal innovation district is not just a bunch of healthcare nerds,” he said jokingly. (Clay, a neurologist, took umbrage.) “What you really need is a merger of the more bohemian arts culture combined with a business culture. If you take the funky, cool music scene on Red River and blend that with the nerdy UT academic scene, that really is the ideal entrepreneurial culture.”

That culture will then lead to innovation, Clay says. When you mix people together and encourage entrepreneurship and an adventurous attitude in an environment other than suburban business parks, which was the model 20 years ago, then great things happen. It’s about programs and it’s about space.

“From the healthcare perspective, we’re trying to think about keeping people well instead of taking care of the sick,” Greg says. Innovation is more about stepping back and thinking about what a good wellness system would look like and not so much what the next cool gadget will be. There’s already an incredible innovation culture in Austin and he says we just need to give these innovators more space to work in.

Our panelists agreed the private sector will respond well to the incoming project. “There’s a lot that will be planned but there’s no inventory, nowhere to go,” Michelle notes. The private sector will lead in terms of getting its goals accomplished and the city hopes that it can keep up with that demand in its development.

Larry, pictured above with Rick, is excited to see what will happen with the privately held land nearby. “We missed out on transit,” he says. “We were idiots for not supporting transit through this area.”

He clarifies that transit is concentrated on the west side of Downtown and there is a tremendous need for expansion on the east side, particularly since access to transportation to lower-income people is now seen as part of the broader picture of health.