Northeast Georgia Health System (NGHS) officially broke ground on the system’s newest medical plaza in Dawson County on Wednesday.
Medical Plaza 2 will be located at 22 Prestige Lane next to the system’s existing building off Ga. 400. The new plaza is scheduled to open in 2024.
Daniel Tuffy, President and Chief Administrative Officer of Northeast Georgia Physicians Group (NGPG), said the new plaza will greatly expand the services that NGHS will be able to offer to Dawson and its surrounding counties.
“Medical Plaza 400 opened in 2013; since then we can all agree that this area has changed and grown quite a bit,” Tuffy said. “In this decade that we’ve been here, Northeast Georgia and NGPG have expanded to keep up with the growth of the region, adding new specialties and physicians so all our residents can have care closer to home. That’s why we’re excited to bring even more services and expanded care home to this community.”
The existing medical plaza will turn into mainly primary care services with radiology, and the new building will have enough room to host both the existing and new specialists, Tuffy said.
Medical Plaza 1 will include NGPG family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine and psychiatry, as well as the HealthLink Lab, imaging and radiology. Medical Plaza 2 will house NGPG OBGYN, orthopedic surgery, sports medicine, urgent care and urology, along with cardiology services provided by the Georgia Heart Institute.
Having all of these services available between the two buildings will make patient care easier for both the physicians and the patients, Tuffy said.
He also mentioned the upcoming hospital, NGMC Lumpkin, that is expected to open next year in neighboring Lumpkin County.
“That future hospital campus will also add surgery to the list of services so people in Dawson and Lumpkin counties will no longer have to travel across the lake or south to busier parts of Georgia 400 for less complex cases,” Tuffy said. “That means you’ll have even quicker trips to the emergency care and hospital care.”
The new medical building will be three stories tall and have over 32,000 square feet of space, and the NGHS team is estimating that there will be over 100,000 patient visits to the new building each year.
Georgia Heart Institute cardiologist Veerappan Subramaniyam, who has served the Dawsonville area for several years and is known as Dr. Ramesh to his patients, said that from a cardiology viewpoint having the new building and more space will make a huge difference to his team and to the patients they serve.
“The heart center of Northeast Georgia Medical has been a longstanding and trusted practice in Dawsonville; about a year and a half ago we relaunched as Georgia Heart Institute with a renewed passion to bring the most progressive cardiovascular team to this area,” he said. “We’re very excited to move into Medical Plaza 2, where we’ll have expanded space to provide a wider array of services so that we can continue to help people in and around Dawson County. We have been and we will continue to bring world-class cardiology care to this area.”