The plan is to build a medical office building in the next two years on what will be Providence’s Eastlake Campus, and have a full-service hospital there perhaps in five years, Nicholas Tejeda, the executive who runs the Providence network for Tenet Healthcare Corp., said after the announcement ceremony at the site. Tenet is a national hospital chain based in Dallas.

It would be Providence’s eighth El Paso-area hospital, including two microhospitals.

“Tenet’s belief in El Paso is affirmed with this investment,” Tejeda told the El Paso Times. “I believe it’s been over $2 billion (invested) over the last 20 years into our community.”

That includes Providence’s newest hospitals — the East Campus, opened in 2008, the Transmountain Campus, opened in January 2017, and the Horizon City microhospital, opened in September 2017 — and renovation of its four other hospitals, Tejeda said.

Providence, with about 5,000 employees, also is this area’s largest private employer, he noted.

The Horizon City microhospital, located about 3 miles from the Eastlake site, has one of the busiest emergency rooms in the Providence network, Tejeda said.

Nathan Worley, Providence group chief strategy officer, said the influx of patients from the Eastlake area into Providence’s existing hospitals is one of the reasons Providence officials knew this was “the right time and the right investment” for the network.

The residential, commercial, and industrial development, including the opening of the huge Amazon distribution center near Eastlake and Interstate 10 in late 2021, also attracted Providence to the 30-acre site, Worley said.

“Part of what truly attracted us to this specific location is the quality of new homes in the area,” which hopefully will help recruit doctors within El Paso and from out of town to put offices in Providence’s planned office complex, he said.

The 30-acre site is in the heart of Mission Ridge, a 4,763-acre community developed over the past 20 years by Hunt Communities, a part of Hunt Cos., a large national real estate development and management group headed by well-known El Paso businessman Woody Hunt.

Hunt Cos. sold the 30-acre site to Providence. It also sold about 30 acres to Providence years ago for its Transmountain hospital in West El Paso.

“This investment by The Hospitals of Providence is one in a series of bold moves that people have made over the years to transform” the once-empty desert area into a “thriving and very busy master-planned community,” Justin Chapman, Hunt Communities president, said at the announcement ceremony.

“We think health care is a critical part of any community development,” Chapman said after the ceremony. “When people are looking for homes, especially people as they age, proximity to health care is important.”

Mission Ridge has more than 10,000 homes now and will have about 15,000 homes and about 45,000 residents when completed in the future, Chapman said.

How large the Providence office complex will be hinges on how many doctors it can recruit to the site, Tejeda said. It likely will be similar in size to the office complexes at the network’s East Side and Transmountain campuses, he said.

The East Campus has a three-story, 61,000-square-foot medical office building with 19 offices; Transmountain has a three-story, 110,000 square-foot building with 17 offices.

Development of the Eastlake Campus is based on Providence’s past experience, Tejeda said.

Once doctors get established in the Eastlake office complex, “then it will make sense to develop an acute-care hospital to serve the needs of the physicians and their patients,” he said.

Vic Kolenc may be reached at 546-6421; vkolenc@elpasotimes.com; @vickolenc on Twitter.