Nashville to build world's largest medical trade center

A company best known for furniture and apparel marts heads to a city best known for country music, and they partner to build the world’s largest medical trade center. Sound implausible? I thought so too, until I talked to Bill Winsor, president and CEO of Market Center Management Company (MCMC) and heard the back story.

MCMC, an international wholesale trade center and tradeshow management company in Dallas, is getting ready to break ground on the Nashville Medical Trade Center, a 1.5 million square foot facility that will be built on the existing Nashville Convention Center. The medical trade center will have a permanent manufacturer showroom (with everything from surgical equipment to health information technology products), temporary trade show space and conference facilities . It will open in 2013.

Excerpts of my recent conversation with Winsor are below.

Your company, Market Center Management Company, manages trade centers?

Yes. Today the predominant industries are consumer goods—apparel, furniture, lighting. Here in Dallas, and in Brussels and Shanghai.

Health care is a slight shift from furniture.

We looked at developing a medical trade center when I joined the company in 1981.

What was the landscape then, and what’s changed in the health care industry that makes this possible now?

Then it was not as technology driven, not as complex with regulation. Technology has pervasively entered the picture. Mart centers tend to work best when the channels of distribution—how products are bought and sold—are turbulent. And it’s definitely turbulent in the health care industry.

The timing with respect to creating transparency on how these products are bought and sold is important. Having a permanent destination with a critical mass of the various parts of the industry makes a lot of sense today. The providers out there buying products are facing a lot of complex decisions.

Why Nashville?

I knew of Nashville as a country and music center. I went into the city, and it was an extremely different expression of industry than I expected. I went there at the request of some businesspeople. We met with the Nashville Health Care Council--350 companies all in the health care industry. I was surprised by that--that they had such a significant base of industry there. When you look at Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) being headquartered there, and Vanderbilt, all of a sudden it made a lot of sense.

Twenty percent of the hospitals in America are controlled or owned by companies based in Nashville. HCA has spawned hundreds of companies in the last 15 years from people who worked there and went out and started their own companies. There’s a huge venture capital support there.

And Nashville had announced building a new convention center. I asked what they were going to do with the existing convention center, and they said they didn’t have any plans. They have 30-some odd meeting rooms, a 670-room hotel, parking--they had all the elements that are very difficult to finance when you’re trying to get a mart built. So with that in place, we’re skirting the issue and adding 11 floors on top of it.

All of a sudden it made our decision tree look a lot different. We’ve looked at marts all over the world. Personally I’ve been involved in consulting or building 20 or 25, everywhere from Peru to China. Most of the time we try to convince governments that they should not consider it; it’s not always “build it and they will come.” It’s a large staff of people that are developing events. So when we sit down with these foreign governments and talk about what’s required, they begin to see the picture. In Nashville, having an adaptive reuse for that facility gave us a head start on getting this thing packaged up.

I understand there are a couple other medical trade centers in development—New York City and Cleveland.

I think the New York project has now been cancelled. They don’t really have a staff anymore. It was an ambitious plan to build new construction in downtown Manhattan.

The other project is the one that’s been announced for Cleveland. It’s quite small—130,000 square feet. That’s one floor of the project we’re developing in Nashville. In Dallas, for example, we have 6.5 million square feet.

If you look at the health care industry I’d contend it’s different than the apparel industry. Isn’t it one-sixth of our economy? Scale is vital. Without scale you can’t create critical mass. They want to be able to come into an environment, and when they make that capital purchase, feel comfortable they’ve surveyed the market.

Walk me through this. Say I run a surgery center and want to see the newest technology for certain equipment. How would I use the medical trade center?

Let’s say you have a procurement team and want to look at medical devices—heart implants or hip replacements--and you have a capital budget approved. You realize your equipment needs to be improved. It could be as simple as placing one phone call to the Nashville Medical Trade Center, and your hospital would schedule a time to bring your team in, maybe three days. You know there are four vendors you want to see, and some others we recommend, and we set up appointments, arrange hotel rooms, lunch and meeting rooms so you can meet privately after you meet with the vendors.

So we coordinate the entire program. We do that now for other industries. We do private buys for Wal-Mart or Neiman’s. We’ve taken that formula and applied it to health care. We take the wear and tear out of it. It’s different from a trade show because you can control the meetings and the appointments. It reduces the amount of time from weeks to three days. It allows a person who can’t travel to do videoconferencing from the center to the hospital. Physicians being able to leave their work practice has become so difficult, because billable hours are so valuable.

How many vendors will you have?

About 300 to 350 from all over the world.

And there will be all kinds of medical supplies and equipment?

If they can’t carry it into a hospital and demonstrate it, then it will be there—surgical equipment, hospital beds, disease management equipment, imaging equipment. Things that require hands-on demonstration. Not things that can be ordered from a catalog.

So you won’t be selling Band-Aids there?

No. Or scalpels and gloves.

Once you buy, say, some imaging equipment, would you go back for training?

Yes, or you could do the training at your hospital. We’re also working on continuing education.

And we’re creating simulated rooms. We’re making an OR room, ER room, neonatal lab, cadavic lab [where they do autopsies] and a lab where they demonstrate how implants work). That’s the interesting part of this--putting different companies together and simulating the environment.

The Healthcare Information and Management Society—HIMSS—they are making a simulated hospital on the top floor. It will connect the OR, the patient room, patient records, admissions. There will be more than 100 vendors that will set up. We saw this idea at the HIMSS show, but we thought putting this together on a permanent basis would be valuable, just showing the simulations with all the dummies in a connected environment.

I once visited the nursing school at Vanderbilt and saw these training dummies in action. They were breathing and had vital signs, and it was unbelievably real. It was kind of scary.

I saw one dummy who simulated a heart attack.

What kind of technology will be available at the center to help vendors and visitors looking at equipment?

We had a team find out what folks wanted in terms of technology. One of the most interesting things we learned is that the pathologists can’t have a good meeting at a hotel, because the meeting rooms are not set up to go completely black. So when they are looking at a film, they can’t get a good sense of the pathology to interpret the condition of the patient. That’s something we would not have known. The interconnectivity and ability to do webinars is a requirement for this industry. It’s not so in the consumer market, but it is in health care.

Everything in the industry is very high-tech. You talk about going in and getting your knee replaced, and then you’re mowing the yard three days later. It’s different from when I was growing up playing football. I’m getting ready to have surgery for a torn meniscus. They asked when it happened, and I said it was Friday night, October 27 at 7:15 in 1965. Now I’m finally getting it operated on. They said it would take less than 30 minutes.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com