Should the need to be admitted to the hospital ever arise, Marguerite James says she doesn't care what name is on the building.
She's even more indifferent to a recently settled dispute between Northeast Georgia Medical Center and Barrow Regional Medical Center.
"I don't see what the big fuss is. There's enough sick people to go around," said James, a 32-year-old Braselton resident.
For the last three years, Barrow Regional, which operates a 56-bed hospital in Winder, has pursued legal avenues to prohibit Northeast Georgia Medical from opening a 100-bed hospital in Braselton. Officials with the Winder hospital argued the new hospital would cause problems for their facility, less than 15 miles away.
"I can see how they'd be worried," said Ernest Austin, a 60-year-old Braselton resident. "We're a small town; what do we need that many hospitals for?"
On Tuesday, the Georgia Supreme Court denied Barrow's petition and gave Northeast Georgia Medical the green light to proceed with the new facility in South Hall.
Since the certificate of need for the project was first approved by the Georgia Department of Community Health in 2007, a lot has changed, including the economy and the passage of health care reform legislation. With that in mind, Northeast Georgia Medical officials say the first step toward completing the new hospital will be to review existing plans.
"When we originally filed the (certificate of need), it acknowledged that a project of this size requires a tremendous amount of planning," said Tracy Vardeman, Northeast Georgia Health System vice president for strategic planning and marketing. "Since a lot of time has passed since we originally filed, we want to go back and look at our previous planning assumptions."
Hospital executives say they still will meet original stipulations that require work to begin on the site within 12 months.
The new South Hall hospital will go on the system's 119-acre campus off Thompson Mill Road. Currently, the only building on the site is Medical Plaza 1 at River Place, but Northeast Georgia Medical executives say the recent court decision may necessitate an additional office building.
"(Medical Plaza 1) is almost full and we anticipate with this latest ruling that there will be heightened interest (from the medical community)," said Jim Gardener, Northeast Georgia Medical Center president and CEO. "We anticipate needing a second office building fairly quickly."
The services available in the existing and anticipated office buildings coupled with the future hospital will help make the South Hall campus a "health care destination," officials say.
"We feel like there is a need for those health care services in that market area, which is why we pursued this in the first place," Vardeman said. "We want this to be a place where people seek out health care resources - not just hospital services."