$311 Million Approved for Construction of New UT Health Sciences College of Medicine Building

The Tennessee General Assembly Thursday approved the funding of $311 million recommended by Governor Bill Lee for the construction of a new $350 million College of Medicine Interdisciplinary Building at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences.

The 275,000- to 300,000-square-foot building will be located on the Memphis campus on Madison Avenue, between the College of Pharmacy Building at 881 Madison Ave. and the recently demolished Holiday Inn building at the corner of Madison Avenue and Pauline Street.

"This is a transformative step for UT Health Sciences, as well as for health and health care of the people of Tennessee," said Chancellor Peter Buckley, MD. "Tennessee currently ranks near the bottom in overall health outcomes. This building will serve as a hub for training future health care professionals to practice collaborative, state-of-the-art care across Tennessee."

The new building will allow room to expand the medicine class from 175 to 250 per cohort and the Physician Assistant Program to grow from 30 to 60 students per year. Because UT Health Sciences has a statewide footprint, this stands to have a measurable impact on health care across Tennessee.

"This is an investment in continuing to meet the significant deficit in physicians and physician assistants in the state of Tennessee, with projections suggesting that there will be a need for 6,000 additional physicians in the state by 2030," said Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Operating Officer Raaj Kurapati, who is leading the project. Additionally, demand for interdisciplinary roles is expected to grow, such as nurse anesthetists by 40% and physician assistants by 28%.

New technology will facilitate interdisciplinary training aimed at producing health care providers who are equipped to work together to meet the demands of health care today.

It will support telehealth training in multiple fields and increase the use of online educational opportunities for the College of Medicine and other colleges, allowing for eventual increases in the number of academic certificate programs and enrollment in those programs.

The building is also expected to enhance the university's already growing response to the rural health care challenges in Tennessee.

As Tennessee's only statewide, academic health science center, UT Health Sciences trains the health care workforce for Tennessee with campuses at major hospitals in Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It is expected the new building will enable the university to graduate an additional 1,450 health care professionals practicing in various fields over its first five years of operation.

While the state has made the lead investment in the building, the university must raise an additional $50 million in philanthropic support to bring the project to the finish line, including $39 million toward the costs of the building and additional funds for specialized equipment and programmatic support.

A strategic space inventory of the campus was done prior to the initial programming for the building to determine how it could support future needs.

HOK, a global design, architecture, engineering, and planning firm, conducted the inventory and designed the programming for the proposed building.

In August, the state approved the university's spending up to $10 million to allow for planning and design of the building, which helped keep the project moving and allowed the institution to save about 15 months on the project timeline.

The university has selected brg3s architects, a Memphis-based firm with a long history in health care, to design the building and work in collaboration with HOK.

Once all approvals are received from the state, the aim is to begin construction in late Fall 2026. Substantial completion is anticipated in 2029.

"I think this is one of those landmark events at a college of medicine," said UT Health Sciences' College of Medicine Executive Dean Michael Hocker, MD. "Thanks to the state-of-the-art technology, we'll be able to expand interprofessional education, which is really how we practice medicine."