Joel EngelhardtUHS names hospital for company founder, Alan B. Miller, who lives nearby; it’s the first new north county hospital since 1979.
Although it’s a Fortune 500 corporation with 400 hospitals and $17 billion in revenue, Universal Health Services came across like a family shop Wednesday as officials cut the ribbon on the first new full-service hospital to open in north county since 1979.
The 156-bed Alan B. Miller Medical Center in Palm Beach Gardens’ Alton community off Interstate 95 and Donald Ross Road, the centerpiece of a $430 million medical complex, is named for the UHS founder who makes his home in nearby Admirals Cove.
“My wife and I are longtime Florida residents, my family as well, and we are your neighbors,” Alan B. Miller, 88, told the crowd of more than 500 people jammed into a tent outside the hospital building.
“I expect this hospital, like all our others, to treat patients the way I would want my family treated,” he said. “And the last thing I’ll say, and I mean this so sincerely, this hospital is a blessing for this community. In the future, you will see that it is so essential to keeping people well and saving lives.”
Miller’s son, Marc, the company’s president and CEO, took responsibility for naming the hospital after his dad, making an exception to company-naming protocols.
“To say that he wasn’t exactly thrilled at the beginning is a little bit of an understatement. It’s not really his style,” Marc Miller said.
“My father’s journey is reflected in this medical center’s dedication to providing superior care close to home. It’s something he has always talked about in his 47 years running this company. And we are beyond thrilled to be able to bring this facility to the north county area. It’s a place where we have both spent much time over the years, and we really cherish this part of Florida.”
The hospital, which is built to expand to 290 beds and could seek approvals for an additional tower to add even more, is the 30th acute-care hospital in the UHS system, which includes Florida hospitals in Wellington, Bradenton and Sarasota.
UHS, based in King of Prussia, Pa., considers itself the nation’s largest provider of behavioral health care hospitals, with 346 inpatient facilities including 16 in Florida. In South Florida, it owns Coral Shores in Stuart, SandyPines Residential Treatment Center in Jupiter/Tequesta and Fort Lauderdale Behavioral.
While staff is in place and some labs are up and running, the Palm Beach Gardens hospital’s actual opening date is May 19.
New full-service hospitals rare
The Alton hospital will compete most directly with independently owned Jupiter Medical Center, built in 1979, and Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center, a Tenet Healthcare hospital that opened in 1968.
While medical centers have been expanding exponentially throughout Palm Beach County, full-service hospitals that offer 24/7 emergency care, specialized departments, operating theaters and advanced diagnostics are relatively rare.
A web search revealed two others built since 2022 in Florida: the 250-bed Orlando Health Lake Mary Hospital, which replaced the South Seminole Hospital; and AdventHealth Minneola, an 80-bed hospital that opened last year.
But medical needs are hardly going unmet.
Hospital providers are dotting the area with free-standing emergency rooms and surgical centers that avoid the hefty costs of operating a full-service hospital.
Well-established hospitals are flocking here with satellite facilities, surgical centers and freestanding ERs to be near donors and affluent patients. Among them: University of Miami, Cleveland Clinic, Hospital for Special Surgery, NYU Langone Health and a partnership of Tampa General Hospital and Mass General Brigham.
Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach, owned by Tenet, recently announced plans to raze its waterfront complex and replace it with a new hospital and medical office tower, rental housing, two luxury condominiums and a hotel.
The Miller center features 35 emergency room beds, 30 intensive care rooms, 30 medical-surgical suites and six posh, VIP rooms on the seven-story hospital’s top floor that include a family lounge and kitchen area clustered next to the patient’s bed.
The hospital will offer robotic surgery, orthopedics, radiology, stroke and heart care, advanced imaging, emergency and critical care, gynecologic and surgical oncology and spinal surgery.
The sleek building with the distinctive blue trim visible from I-95 just south of the Carrier Global headquarters has been under construction since 2023.
Navigated neighborhood opposition
It is among the first hospitals built since Florida dropped the certificate of need requirement in 2019 that often blocked hospital construction. That meant UHS merely needed to obtain site-plan approval from the Palm Beach Gardens City Council to move forward.
All five City Council members attended Wednesday, taking part in the ceremonial ribbon-cutting.
UHS Florida Vice President Kevin DiLallo, who shepherded the hospital to approval, didn’t speak Wednesday but in 2022 he said UHS had documented a need for a third north county hospital.
“The need has been established based upon increasing population growth and local demographics, and we will staff appropriately, in accordance with industry and accrediting body standards,” he wrote.
He had to overcome the efforts of a mysterious opponent in 2022 who created a polished website called SaveAlton that drummed up outrage with a slick video saying hospital traffic would ruin the neighborhood. While never fully identified, the website left a paper trail that led to a Clearwater-based land planner.
The hospital also faced more practical opposition from neighbors in Alton who persuaded UHS to reduce its proposal from 450 total beds to 300 and locate the hospital farther north on the 32-acre site.
To make room, UHS flip-flopped the hospital’s proposed location with a four-story medical office building, now under construction, that was permitted on the south side closer to million-dollar Alton homes.
