Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Novant Health opened the doors June 16 to Scotts Hill Medical Center, a $294 million, 66-bed surgical hospital straddling the Pender and New Hanover county border near Wilmington, N.C., Wilmington Biz reported June 12.
The development is one of several outpatient moves the system is making across the Carolinas at once. The 250,000-square-foot facility was designed around surgery. It includes eight operating rooms, two gastroenterology and endoscopy procedure rooms, a cardiac catheterization lab, a 29-bed pre- and post-surgery unit and a 12-bed post-anesthesia care unit.
The Scotts Hill opening is part of a broader outpatient push that the system has been executing across North and South Carolina. Novant broke ground in 2025 on a 15,050-square-foot ASC in Leland, N.C. Separately, the system broke ground on a medical office building in Charlotte that will house a multispecialty ASC alongside primary care, cardiology and gastroenterology services.
In South Carolina, Novant opened four new primary care and specialty clinics in Summerville in March, adding OB-GYN, general surgery, bariatric and maternal-fetal medicine services to the Charleston-area market. The system had previously acquired majority ownership of two outpatient surgery centers in Mount Pleasant, S.C. — Southeastern Spine Institute’s ASC, which has six surgery and procedure rooms, and a gastroenterology-focused facility — as part of its expansion following the acquisition of East Cooper Medical Center and hospitals in Hilton Head and Hardeeville.
Novant also broke ground on its first medical campus in the Upstate region of South Carolina in August 2025. The $132 million project will include a medical office building with physician clinics and an ASC. A 20-bed, outpatient-focused hospital with a full operating room suite, specialty care and diagnostic imaging has already received state approval and is expected to open in early 2027.
“This is more than breaking ground on a building. This campus represents a significant investment in the Upstate,” Jason Bernd, senior vice president and president of Novant Health’s South Carolina region, said at the groundbreaking.
All of it feeds into an explicit strategic target. Leslie Barrett, BSN, RN, senior vice president of ambulatory surgery strategy and execution at Novant Health, told Becker’s in February that the system is building toward a 25-center ASC network. The thesis is site-of-service optimization: moving lower-acuity cases out of hospitals and into ambulatory settings, freeing inpatient capacity for complex patients while offering patients shorter stays, lower costs and locations closer to home.
“Novant Health is building a flexible, scalable outpatient surgical network in a way that benefits everyone involved,” Ms. Barrett said. “It offers patients affordability and expanded access close to home.”
Novant has also built governance structures to support the shift — including tools to standardize site-of-service decisions across markets and staffing models designed to scale as outpatient volumes grow. The system has said it is calibrating expansion plans alongside recent changes to North Carolina’s certificate-of-need laws, which have begun to open the market for freestanding surgical development.
The coastal buildout doesn’t stop with outpatient surgery. In February, Novant’s board approved a capital plan of more than $1 billion for its Wilmington footprint, which will include a heart and vascular patient tower, a second heart and vascular medical office building and a physical rehabilitation hospital at New Hanover Regional Medical Center. That tower is slated to open in 2031.
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