AUSTIN BUSINESS JOURNAL: New ER planned to serve Manor's growing population

A small-scale emergency services medical facility will soon be built in Manor to better serve the fast-growing suburb just east of Austin. 

TXM MicroHospital plans to start construction soon on the TXM Manor Emergency Room, which will be a 24,000-square-foot hospital that can provide emergency services to Manor residents, some of whom have long had to make the 20-minute-plus drive to Austin for immediate care. The facility will be built on a 3.6-acre site at 12838 U.S. Highway 290. 

It's the first of 10 similar facilities that the company plans to build across Central Texas in the coming years. St. David's HealthCare is also building an ER facility in Manor, which is slated to open in the fall.

TXM's Manor facility, which will be physician-owned, aims to have a six-bed emergency department, a six-bed inpatient department and two operating suites, with the goal of patients only having to wait five to 10 minutes to see a physician. It could have 60 to 70 full-time staff, said Dr. Harbir Singh, the founder of TXM MicroHospital who also practices emergency medicine. Singh said this facility will accept all commercial insurance providers. 

A groundbreaking is scheduled for June 26, and the facility is scheduled to open in July 2026. 

The impetus for the project was that Singh doesn't think the city has enough medical services for its fast-growing population. There is at least one medical facility in Manor that can quickly help residents — a CareNow Urgent Care facility — but many of the other options in the city focus on primary care and close around 5 p.m. most days, according to a Google search.

“They're building a lot of homes out there and it's a medical desert,” he said. “Their primary care practices, from what our research showed, had a couple months of wait and patients were driving 30 minutes to get into emergency care. So we felt that the community needed it.”

St. David's almost 11,000-square-foot emergency room facility in Manor is being built at 10703 E. US 290 Highway. CEO David Huffstutler said in a statement it will serve as an extension of St. David’s Medical Center, which receives a lot of patients from eastern Travis County.

Manor’s population has grown rapidly from 13,642 residents in 2020 to 21,500 residents in 2024, marking an almost 58% surge, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Manor doesn’t expect its growth to slow anytime soon and has plans to build a city hall large enough to accommodate administrative functions for a city with 100,000 residents.

Scott Jones, Manor's economic development director, also said he is on the recruiting trail to bring a major hospital to Manor. Jones said more health care is needed since the city projects that it will add 14,000 more homes in the next 5 to 7 years.

This will be the first development for TXM MicroHospital, which is based in Austin. Singh, who also co-founded the Kyle ER and Hospital, said future expansions will focus on growing Central Texas communities where there is a demand for more health care services. 

TXM MicroHospital wants its locations to operate better than existing emergency room facilities, which Singh said, from his experience in working in these facilities, often put both patients and medical professionals in overly stressful situations. 

“Everybody's just overworked and the system is just too burdened,” Singh said. “The TXM facility, for example, we're really taking a more of a holistic approach, where it's going to blend in a little bit of hospitality and healthcare.”

TXM MicroHospital is funded through a mix of physicians and their friends and families, plus some “high-net-worth investors,” said Singh. He said TXM MicroHospital will look for additional investors to help fund the buildout of future locations. 

“We'll work with some real estate or institutional investors,” Singh said. “But primarily we want to maintain control at the local level, so the physicians don't lose it. … The private equity-backed health care, in general, has not been great for patients or physicians. So we're trying to find that middle-ground solution.”

Read the story on the Austin Business Journal’s website here