Nashville Not Center of Healthcare Industry After All
And now for a little breaking news - because this isn't the kind of data the local Chamber of Commerce is going to be pushing out there in press releases to the mainstream media.

Healthcare management is a big employer in Nashville, and the city is the region's medical center with several big hospitals and the medical research/teaching hospital at Vanderbilt University. We all know that. But Nashville is small-time in the overall national healthcare economy, according to the Milken Institute, an independent economic think tank in California, which has just published a report, America’s Health Care Economy.

In fact, Nashville did not make the list of Top 20 healthcare metros.

The report says the health care industry ranges from health services, such as health practitioners and hospitals, drugs and pharmaceuticals, medical instruments and supplies, medical service and health insurance, to research and testing services where much of the burgeoning biotechnology sector is recorded.

The Milken Institute looked at the size and total employment of several sectors of the healthcare economy, including Drugs, Medical Instruments & Supplies, Medical Service & Health Insurance, Offices & Clinics of Medical Doctors, Offices & Clinics of Dentists, Offices of Osteopathic Physicians, Offices of Other Health Care Practitioners, Nursing & Personal Care Facilities, Hospitals, Medical & Dental Labs, Home Health Care Services, Health & Allied Services, and Research & Testing Services.

The Milken Institute has created this Health Pole Index to depict the health care industry concentration in a given geographic location and the level of importance a metropolitan area's (MSA) health care industry concentration has in the context of the nation as a whole. The Health Pole concept can be thought of as a measure of the spatial density and diversity of health-care sectors in a metropolitan economy and placed in a national perspective.

The Health Pole rankings are based on combining an MSA's health care industry location quotient (the concentration of health care in an economy) with its share of national health care employment. MSAs then are ranked according to their composite scoring. The metro area with the highest composite score for a given health care industry is assigned a benchmark score of 100. All subsequent ranking metropolitan areas have scores that indicate their placement relative to the benchmark.

The top 20:
1 Boston MA-NH
2 New York NY
3 Philadelphia PA-NJ
4 Chicago IL
5 Los Angeles-Long Beach CA
6 Washington DC-MD-VA-WV
7 Detroit MI
8 Nassau-Suffolk NY
9 Newark NJ
10 Minneapolis-St.Paul MN-WI
11 Pittsburgh PA
12 Baltimore MD
13 St. Louis MO-IL
14 Cleveland-Lorain-Elyria OH
15 Houston TX
16 New Haven-Meriden CT
17 San Diego CA
18 Rochester MN
19 Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater FL
20 Miami FL

The ranking is based on total health care employment in 2001

Nashville did rank 1st in Offices of Other Health Care Practitioners; 5th in Health and Allied Services; 16th in Medical & Dental Laboratories; 23rd in Medical Services & Health Insurance.

The state of Tennessee ranked 7th in Offices of Other Health Care Practitioners, and 8th in Medical and Dental Labs (both ranked by employment concentration).

Knoxville ranked 14th in Research & Testing Services. Memphis ranked 24th in Medical & Dental Laboratories.