New ER, Micro Hospital Coming to Manor, But Regional Hospital Still Needed

If you live in Manor and need to get to a hospital or emergency room, you are praying to the traffic gods that it's not rush hour, that there are no accidents or weather-related slowdowns.

It could take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or more to get to a Central Austin hospital, 30 minutes or more to get to Round Rock and about 20 minutes or more to get to the closest hospital in Pflugerville.

The city in northeastern Travis County has a few medical clinics: Austin Regional Clinic for family and internal medicine; a Baylor Scott & White clinic for primary care; a CommUnityCare clinic with family medicine and women's health, and a People's Community Clinic presence at the Manor school district. It also has a few urgent care centers.

What it does not have is a hospital or an emergency room or medical specialty clinics for chronic illnesses.

Soon, Manor will have two new emergency rooms, one of which is a micro hospital with some specialized overnight care.

St. David's moving to Manor

By the end of September, St. David's HealthCare with open a free-standing emergency room, just west of downtown Manor on U.S. 290.

The 10,840-square-foot building will be staffed 24 hours a day with doctors board-certified in emergency care and will meet the same requirements as the emergency departments inside St. David's hospitals. St. David's expect to hire 25 employees, some of whom might come from other St. David's emergency departments.

Unlike with other St. David's free-standing emergency rooms, this one will not sit on land big enough to later support a hospital, as St. David's has done in Leander and will do in Kyle.

Without a helicopter pad, the emergency room will rely on ground ambulances to take patients to St. David's Medical Center in Austin if they require more care or need to be hospitalized for further treatment or observation.

The city of Manor was trying to get St. David's to consider a full hospital when it went looking for land in the city, said Scott Jones, the economic development director for Manor.

David Huffstutler, the president and CEO of St. David's, said he doesn't think Manor is big enough to support a hospital but is ready for an emergency room and is close enough for patients to easily be transferred to St. David's Medical Center on 32nd Street and Interstate 35 in Austin.

"This is a win-win for us and the community," Huffstutler said. "This facility will be connected to full-service nationally recognized services."

An ER and a micro hospital

Dr. Harbir Singh is bringing what he calls a micro hospital to Manor. It will be similar to the Kyle ER & Hospital he built in Kyle that is scheduled to open in July 2026.

The 24,000-square-foot TXM MicroHospital will be just east of downtown Manor on U.S. 290 and will have six beds in the emergency department and six inpatient beds.

Unlike the St. David's project, it will have two operating rooms to do simple scheduled day surgeries such as gall bladder removal, wrist fractures and nerve blocks, but nothing complicated and not emergency surgeries that would require a more comprehensive stay in the hospital. It also will assist with medical detox after prolonged drug or alcohol use before patients go to a treatment center or do out-patient treatment. The patients in detox will stay overnight three to five days in the micro hospital.

TXM expects to hire more than 60 staff, including 10 or more doctors, Singh said. It is owned by physicians and will not be in-network for insurance, but emergency care has to be covered at in-network rates even if the location is not in your insurance network.

Singh believes the micro hospital will be a "good enough size to meet the needs of the community and be cost effective."

Both Singh and Huffstutler point to the growth of Manor as the reason to build their emergency rooms now.

Preparing for a housing boom

The Manor area is six miles from a Tesla plant, six miles from a Samsung plant and 10 miles from another Samsung plant, three miles from Applied Materials, and more plants are forecasted for the area.

Right now the city has 34,000 residents and nearby Elgin, in northwestern Bastrop County, has 15,000 people, but the growth is coming. Manor has an additional 14,000 new homes in the works and Elgin another 18,000 residences.

Jones estimates the area will grow from 49,000 people currently to 150,000 in the next five to seven years. He also believes that the expansion of the 290 toll road will come to Manor to make it more accessible.

"That is going to change the way health care providers look at a the city of Manor," Jones said.

Manor is building a new City Hall and library with space for more retail and mixed-use buildings, but "we still need a hospital," Jones said.

Mayor Christopher Harvey has had the hospital as a priority and the city has done a feasibility study and identified several locations with enough acreage.

Within 10 years, Harvey said, "it has to be up and running. If it's not, I don't know what's going to happen with all those people that are going to be here. The traffic is going to be terrible from people driving for their health care needs."

A hospital also would bring specialists such as oncologists for cancer care, neurologists for stroke and brain health, cardiologists for heart health, endocrinologists for diabetes care, and nephrologists and a dialysis center for kidney disease.

Harvey worries that people in Manor might be delaying treatment for serious illnesses and catching problems later because of the cost and time of commuting to Austin, taking time off work, and finding transportation and child care to go to appointments.

"The more we wait, the more we lack resources, the sicker people get," Harvey said.

Jones has been trying to recruit all of the local hospital systems as well as going to hospital systems outside of the area to buy land and make a commitment before the cost of land goes up.

"In seven to 10 years it might be too late land-wise," Harvey said. "We are about 10 years behind to get the right infrastructure for this area to grow the way it needs to."

The ER and micro hospital is a right step, he said. "What we are getting is highly needed and we are thankful for it, but the root cause of not having a regional hospital in this area is equity and access."