Transformation of the busy Lovers Lane corridor into a medical hub of sorts took a big step forward Wednesday.

TriStar Greenview Regional Hospital held a ceremonial groundbreaking for a freestanding emergency department being built on a 1.86-acre site at 478 Lovers Lane.

The 11,131-square-foot emergency department will have 11 patient rooms and will be the first freestanding (not attached to a hospital) ER in the region.

“This shows what we’re doing to elevate the level of care in this market,” said Greenview CEO Mike Sherrod. “It will be a full-service ER. Because it’s all new, it will probably be more modern than most hospitals.”

Joe Thomas, regional medical director for Greenview parent HCA Healthcare, expects the freestanding ER to open in April of 2025. He said the new structure is strategically located.

“Having this here allows us to serve a growing area of Bowling Green,” Thomas said. “It will be a fully functioning ER with advanced imaging and a pharmacy.”

Thomas said he will need to add four physicians, along with additional nurses and technicians, to staff a facility that will complement the emergency department at Greenview’s Ashley Circle location.

The freestanding ER is going up in a Lovers Lane corridor that has seen explosive residential growth and a growing health care presence.

It’s near the existing Greenview Surgery Center at 484 Golden Autumn Way and the adjacent 30-acre site where a 72-bed, 238,405-square-foot TriStar Greenview Regional East Hospital is expected to be built.

“We hope in the future we can do a lot more here,” Sherrod told the 50 or so people gathered for the groundbreaking.

In April of 2023, Greenview was awarded a certificate of need for the 72-bed Greenview East hospital. That CON application called for Greenview to invest $350 million to build a facility that would itself have a 12,500-square-foot emergency department with 12 spaces for patients, which will be in addition to the 25 treatment spaces at Greenview’s Ashley Circle emergency department.

Its 72 beds would be transferred from the 211-bed Greenview hospital on Ashley Circle, meaning there would be no initial increase in the total number of beds operated by Greenview.

The application points out that the existing Greenview facility was built in 1972, making it difficult to meet current requirements for certain services.

Despite the CON approval, ground hasn’t been broken for Greenview East and Sherrod isn’t sure when that project will start. As with the freestanding ER, Bowling Green’s Med Center Health has opposed Greenview East and delayed its construction.

“From what I understand, we’re still tied up in court,” Sherrod said.

Another Greenview expansion project, establishment of an ambulance service on its Ashley Circle campus, is also on hold.

Greenview, after five years of trying, won approval last year from the Cabinet for Health and Family Services to start an ambulance service to be called Warren County EMS that would be in addition to Med Center EMS and help meet the need for emergency response in a growing county.

Greenview proposed in its CON application to spend $1,993,103 to establish the ambulance service with offices in a former medical office building adjacent to Greenview’s Ashley Circle headquarters and build a 3,000-square-foot metal building for ambulance bays.

Starting in 2025, the CON application said, Warren County EMS would operate six vehicles and make an estimated 4,500 emergency runs and 1,500 non-emergency runs in its first year.

But that project also remains on hold.

Med Center EMS has had the county ambulance service pretty much to itself since 1980, when the Med Center Health affiliate took over operation of the county ambulance service with no financial support from the city of Bowling Green or the county.

From that beginning, Med Center EMS has grown to a 102-employee operation with 12 ambulances, a 28,000-square-foot base station on East Third Avenue and a second station on Industrial Drive.