Nashville Globe
Nashville healthcare four times bigger than music
If you come to Nashville with a guitar strap around your neck, you’d be better off trading it for a stethoscope. Even better: a healthcare company employee badge.
While some people come for our music, not many of us work in the music business. Nashville’s healthcare industry has a near $40 billion economic impact for the area. According to the Nashville Health Care Council‘s latest economic impact study, completed in partnership with the Business and Economic Research Center (BERC) at Middle Tennessee State University, the industry accounted for 249,345 local jobs in 2014, up 18.14 percent from the 2010 study.
The music industry’s employment footprint is a bit lighter – around $10 billion according to the latest known study from 2013. Music accounts for about 56,000 jobs in Nashville.
Some other eye-popping statistics to come out of the healthcare impact study:
• By 2022, 1 in 11 jobs in TN will be in healthcare
• $5.8 billion in healthcare wages for Metro Nashville
• $66,950 is the average wage for healthcare occupations – it goes a lot further than similar sized Boston. The cost of living in Nashville is just below the national average at 97, whereas Boston sits at 144, primarily due to much higher housing costs (roughly double) and higher utilities.
• $38.8 billion to regional economy from Nashville healthcare – a 32.9 percent increase from 2010, the last year the study was conducted
Not from the healthcare study, but some other recent Nashville healthcare info:
• Three of Modern Healthcare’s list of the 100 most influential people in US healthcare are Nashville-based. A few pegs down the ranks from POTUS and SCOTUS Chief Justice are three executives at hospital management companies – two from HCA and one from Community Health Systems
• New business filings in Nashville’s Davidson county led the state for the second quarter of 2015 at 1,971, or 18 percent of total new business filings for the state- it’s a good bet many are healthcare-related
What’s not apparent from the data is the changing nature of the kinds of healthcare jobs being generated. Health information technology is bringing more data scientists, programmers and analysts into the field alongside the usual MDs, RNs, CPAs and MBAs. Nashville has 600 HIT positions open, according to CareerBuilder.