The developers seeking to bring medical-products trade centers to Cleveland and Nashville don't feel they are in a race with one another, but just in case, they are each trying to stay a step ahead of the other.

Demolition work to clear the way for the Cleveland Medical Mart & Convention Center has already begun, according to its developer, Chicago-based MMPI. Work on the Nashville Medical Trade Center won't start until this summer, but it will be built on top of the city's old convention center, so the cost and time frame for the project are much more favorable than building from scratch, according to that project's developer, Dallas-based Market Center Management Co.

Plans for a similar project in New York were scaled back last year and its developer, GNYHA Ventures, an arm of the Greater New York Hospital Association, no longer has an active site for the project, says Brian Conway, a GNYHA spokesman.

Despite efforts to downplay the competition, there is good reason for the Cleveland and Nashville developers to try to push ahead of the other, says Dennis Daar, managing partner of Medical Strategies International, which provides account management to smaller suppliers. For all but the biggest of suppliers, the costs of renting the space and staffing for a permanent showroom in even one of these projects is going to be difficult, let alone replicating those efforts 500 miles away in the other city, Daar says.

He says Nashville's project will ultimately be more successful because the concentration of investor-owned hospital companies headquartered there puts a huge base of hospital purchasing decisions within a short drive of the downtown trade center.

Living in the Cleveland area, Daar says he's excited about the project, but he faults local leaders for dithering. “The powers that be were very slow in developing the idea and really left the door open for Nashville to come in,” Daar says. “Cleveland is ahead in the process, but Nashville will catch up.”

Construction of the Nashville Medical Trade Center, to be built atop the city’s old convention center, is set to begin this summer.

The $465 million Cleveland project is being funded by a sales tax in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, that was approved four years ago, so it is completely financed, says David Johnson, a spokesman for MMPI. Sixty-two suppliers are committed to lease all the space in the four-story, 230,000-square-foot medical mart that's expected to open in 2013, Johnson says, although he adds that MMPI continues to work with those suppliers and to pursue additional tenants. More than 30 conferences, conventions and trade shows have committed to the mart as well.

Johnson argues that Cleveland, rather than Nashville, is “the nation's medical capital.” Johnson cites the locally based but globally influential Cleveland Clinic Foundation as a major advantage, bolstered by three other local hospital providers, MetroHealth Medical Center, Sisters of Charity Health System and University Hospitals; all four are partners in the project and will be tenants, Johnson says. Steris Corp., a maker of infection-control products based in Mentor, Ohio, will have a permanent showroom at the mart, Johnson says.

Cleveland's healthcare industry employs 480,000 people in some form or another and has $35 billion in economic impact, Johnson adds. Nashville has its own figures for healthcare employment and economic impact—210,000 local jobs and $30 billion in economic impact, according to a study released in July by the Nashville Health Care Council.

Bill Winsor, president and CEO of Market Center Management Co., says using the old convention center as a base enables the Nashville Medical Trade Center to build out to 1.5 million square feet for just $250 million, including about 1.2 million square feet of new construction on top of the old center. The target for opening is early 2013.

“The foundation is there, literally,” Winsor says. “Our construction costs and timeline are very different from a startup project where you need to do the foundation from scratch.”

The project does not yet have committed financing, but Winsor says he expects it will be financed with a combination of conventional construction loans and partnerships.

The Nashville project is focused on larger, more international suppliers than Cleveland, Winsor says. The attractiveness of Nashville is the built-in customer base of investor-owned company headquarters and the larger cohort of some 350 healthcare companies with either headquarters or significant operations in the region, Winsor says. Beyond that, Market Center Management also has had discussions with not-for-profit systems such as Ascension Health, St. Louis, and Catholic Health East, Newtown Square, Pa., Winsor says.

“I think they're quite different,” Winsor says of the competing projects. “I don't see it as a race.”

Nashville-based Vanderbilt University Medical Center is signed up as a partner for continuing education programs that are hosted off- campus, according to a news release from Market Center Management last month. Last year, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society agreed to make the medical trade center the permanent home of its interoperability showcase, which demonstrates how healthcare IT applications can share patient data across a variety of systems.

“We already have a series of programs that we've lined up,” Winsor says. “That's how you create the animation and the traffic.”