BayCare Acquisition Expands Tampa Campus by More Than 75%

CLEARWATER, Fla., Feb. 4, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- BayCare, West Central Florida's largest health care provider, announced Tuesday that it had acquired a 36-acre office parcel just west of its St. Joseph's hospitals' campus in Tampa to provide room for strategic growth. The partial acquisition of the Tampa Bay Park includes three buildings and two parking garages and is adjacent to St. Joseph's, St. Joseph's Children's and St. Joseph's Women's hospitals. 

The acreage increases by more than 75% the health system's property holdings in the West Tampa neighborhood where St. Joseph's Hospital has operated for nearly a century. The health system intends to use the property over time to consolidate services from leased offices and to provide room for strategic growth plans, including expanding its BayCare Medical Group physician practice and to provide a headquarters for its rapidly growing graduate medical education (GME) and research programs. 

"As West Central Florida grows, so must BayCare to continue our mission to improve our communities' health," said Stephanie Conners, BayCare president and CEO. "The opportunity to buy such a large piece of property contiguous to one of our largest medical campuses provides us the opportunity to expand important specialty services for our patients and communities. This expanded campus will serve the entire region as a medical destination for specialty care." 

In the short term, BayCare is working individually with tenants of the facilities to support lease agreements. Relocating or adding BayCare offices and clinics to the property will happen over time. 

Eventually, the health system envisions directly linking the property via a new, vehicular bridge to its hospitals' campus and using the facilities to complement the system's needs but also those of St. Joseph's hospitals – three centrally located facilities that are poised to expand to meet the region's needs.  

BayCare has announced it will build a new facility for St. Joseph's Children's Hospital by 2030, and St. Joseph's Hospital and its trauma center remain an essential resource for acute and specialty care for the region. BayCare also has announced it will expand its GME programs to 650 residents by 2029 to help ensure West Central Florida and BayCare continue to attract the best and brightest physicians. Residencies occur after medical school and provide new physicians with supervised, hands-on training in the specialty or sub-specialty of their choice. By the middle of this year, BayCare is anticipating having up to 283 residents across 18 programs serving in its primary footprint of Hillsborough, Pasco, Pinellas and Polk counties. 

"We are excited for the opportunity this provides BayCare, but also our communities," said Kimberly Guy, chief operating officer for BayCare. "To have this many centrally located medical resources together in a single campus will deepen our region's access to BayCare's high-quality, compassionate care. It will also create an environment that attracts the brightest medical professionals to care for our patients." 

The transaction includes the three easternmost buildings (LakePointe One, LakePointe Two and Spectrum) in the office park and their two parking garages, adding 615,656 square feet of office space and 2,501 parking spaces. 

About BayCare

BayCare is a leading not-for-profit health care system that connects individuals and families to a wide range of services at 16 hospitals and hundreds of other convenient locations throughout the Tampa Bay and central Florida regions. The system is West Central Florida's largest provider of behavioral health and pediatric services and its provider group, BayCare Medical Group, is one of the largest in the region. BayCare's diverse network of ambulatory services includes laboratories, imaging, surgical centers, BayCare Urgent Care locations, wellness centers and one of Florida's largest home care agencies, BayCare HomeCare. BayCare's mission is to improve the health of all it serves through community-owned, health care services that set the standard for high-quality, compassionate care. For more information, visit BayCare.org.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baycare-acquisition-expands-tampa-campus-by-more-than-75-302367793.html

SOURCE BayCare Health System