HOUSTON — Houston is home to the largest medical center in the world.
By the numbers
The Texas Medical Center covers more than 2 square miles and is home to 61 different institutions. Those include 21 different hospitals -- many of them ranked the best in the U.S. and even the world -- along with eight academic and research institutions.
The hospitals offer a total of 9,200 patient beds for the more than 10 million patients who visit each year. Some of those patients -- more than 750,000 -- come in through the ER. More than 180,000 of them require surgery. Of those, more than 13,600 are heart surgeries.
Every 20 minutes, a baby is born at a hospital in the Texas Medical Center, adding up to about 26,000 a year.
As you might expect, that number of patients and procedures requires a huge staff. Altogether, the Med Center employs more than 106,000 people.
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How it started
Hermann Hospital admitted its first patient in 1925. But MD Anderson Hospital of Cancer and Research of the University of Texas was the first member institution in 1942.
The Texas Medical Center exploded from there, adding hospitals, such as Texas Children’s and Baylor College of Medicine, while fostering historic medical advances, such as one of the first heart transplants.
Looking ahead
Hospital facilities take up 50 million square feet and there’s $3 billion in new construction underway. The largest medical center in the world is only getting larger.