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The booming North Texas town of Prosper is well on its way to becoming a pediatric health care hub, with the grand opening of the Children’s Health Specialty Center Prosper adding to the area’s medical options for children and adolescents.
Located on a 72-acre parcel of land at the Dallas North Tollway and U.S. Highway 380, Children’s Health’s new three-story medical facility joins a group of other hospitals and outpatient facilities staking claim in Prosper. Fort Worth-based Cook Children’s hosted a ribbon cutting ceremony for its own medical center in November.
The grandeur of Thursday’s event — which will feature a ribbon cutting; performances from local high school drumlines, cheerleaders and dance teams; and remarks from the Prosper mayor — fits the fanfare that has surrounded the competition between health care industry giants to establish themselves in the rapidly growing area north of Dallas.
“The biggest thing is that this is just the beginning. The Children’s Health facility is set on almost 75 acres, so the development is going to bring more than this one building. It’s going to be all the ancillary things to come, additional specialties,” said Prosper Mayor David Bristol. “So I would say stand by, things are going to get even better.”
For years, hospital systems have raced to keep up with the pace of population growth in the area far north of Dallas. Prosper is perhaps the best example of the region’s success: The town jumped from around 9,400 people in 2010 to more than 34,000 in 2021, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
But the not-for-profit Children’s Health system set its eyes on the suburbs inching toward the Texas-Oklahoma border long before Prosper’s population, well, prospered.
Children’s Medical Center Plano, opened in 2008, is undergoing a major expansion that will add a 300,000-square-foot, seven-floor tower and expand bed capacity from 72 to 212. Plano, while not growing at the same trajectory as Prosper, still saw population increases in the last decade, growing from nearly 260,000 people in 2010 to over 288,000 in 2021.
The medical centers in Dallas and Plano are the only two hospitals operated by the health system, while the Prosper location will offer urgent care and specialty services, said Children’s Health northern market president Vanessa Walls.
“Those campuses will still be available to take care of those patients as they need higher level care, but we wanted to be able to get more physician office-based services closer to them because that’s where most of that relationship begins,” Walls said.
Specialty Center Prosper’s first floor houses an urgent care that operates outside of traditional office hours and the Andrews Institute for Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine. The third floor includes a number of specialty services, ranging from cardiology to oncology to audiology, while the second floor is set aside as space for expansion in the future.
Plans for the rest of the massive Prosper medical campus look similar to that of the Specialty Center’s second floor.
“We know that we want to be able to grow there to continue to serve that community, but we haven’t put plans together yet for what will be the next step,” Walls said. “We want to hear from the community what they need, what they want and where they want that care provided.”
Children’s Health isn’t only expanding north. The system, along with its joint operating partner UT Southwestern Medical Center, plans to start construction this spring on a clinic in the Red Bird Mall redevelopment in Southwest Dallas. The hospital duo also plans to construct a new pediatric hospital campus where the Bass Center buildings are currently located on UT Southwestern Medical Center’s campus.
Still, as has long been the case, the majority of hospitals in Dallas County are located north of I-30, meaning that health care facilities aren’t where people with the greatest health care needs live, according to data from the county’s latest Community Health Needs Assessment.
“I think you will see that the hospitals are trying to balance that fact that a lot of their growth is north, but a lot of the population movement is north,” said Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council president and CEO Steve Love. “I do commend the health systems for the work they’re doing, especially in the southern part of Dallas and even Tarrant County.”
Population growth has been largely concentrated north and east of Dallas rather than south. Celina, located just north of Prosper, saw its population skyrocket from 6,000 in 2010 to nearly 24,000 in 2021, while towns south of Dallas like Duncanville, Cedar Hill and DeSoto saw much more modest growth in the last decade.
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