City woos medical center

Tufts-New England Medical Center, in the market for a major suburban campus to complement its main facility in Boston's Chinatown neighborhood, is looking seriously at sites that include Waltham and Westwood, officials there said.

The project was originally planned as a 190-bed, $300 million joint effort by Tufts and New England Baptist Hospital, but the deal was scuttled in February when New England Baptist agreed to partner instead with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and develop Beth Israel's facility in Needham, at the former Glover Hospital.

Tufts is moving forward on its own, and hopes to have a deal in place by summertime, according to its vice president of public affairs and communications, Brooke Tyson Hynes.

"We are proposing a second, suburban campus to the main facility," said Tyson Hynes. "One of our missions is to bring academic-level care to the suburbs."

She declined to name the communities under consideration for the facility.

"We are looking at the strength and weakness of the locations," said Tyson Hynes. "We want to see where there's a community need and how we can complement what our physicians are already doing."

The Tufts University School of Medicine's principal teaching hospital, Tufts-NEMC has a western campus in Springfield's Baystate Medical Center, and is affiliated with several regional institutions, but this project represents its first major foray in Boston's suburbs.

Last week, hospital officials were in Waltham to discuss possibilities, said Mayor Jeannette McCarthy. A Tufts-NEMC campus there would add one more high-profile medical facility to an area dominated by two of its suburban academic affiliates, Partners Healthcare-owned Newton-Wellesley Hospital and Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Burlington.

McCarthy said she didn't want to comment on talks with Tufts officials because negotiations were ongoing. "I can say only that we are in the running," she said.

But McCarthy has lobbied hard to attract an acute-care hospital to the city since Deaconess Waltham Hospital closed in 2003, shuttering the city's only emergency room and sending residents to already-busy ERs at Newton-Wellesley and Lahey.

"There is a definite need here," said the mayor, who had approached St. Elizabeth's, Mount Auburn Hospital, Lahey Clinic and Newton-Wellesley about building an ER in Waltham. All four hospitals declined, saying they intended to beef up their own facilities, not expand emergency services elsewhere, McCarthy said.

If Tufts-NEMC comes to Waltham, an ER is a strongly preferred part of the package, the mayor said. She wouldn't say whether the city would accept a specialty medical facility without emergency services.

Tufts-NEMC has also expressed interest in a site in Westwood, where a 4.5-million-square-foot housing, office and commercial complex is being developed near Route 1 and Interstate 95, according to Town Administrator Michael Jaillet.

The Westwood Station project, named for its proximity to the MBTA's Route 128 commuter rail stop, has some zoning provisions for medical office space, and a proposal to allow expanded ambulatory care there is expected to go before Town Meeting this month, said Jay Doherty, president of Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, developers of the property.

He said several expansion-minded health care organizations -- which he would not name -- had expressed interest in the development, but the talks were preliminary because the project is still in the permitting process. Developers are less interested in a traditional hospital facility, Doherty said, than in a mix of medical uses that could include research and development operations.

Medical offices and healthcare research could be a boon to Westwood Station, where people will live, shop, and work, he said.

"We'd like to see there be a significant component friendly to empty nesters and baby boomers, who do require an increasingly larger array of medical services as they get older," said Doherty.

A location in the south suburbs could be particularly advantageous to Tufts-NEMC, which operates New England Quality Care Alliance, a physicians network with practices in Brockton, Weymouth, and Cape Cod. There is also more space for competition in the area, which is mainly served by Caritas Norwood Hospital.

The hospital is considered one of the strongest members of the financially challenged Caritas Christi network, which the Archdiocese of Boston has tentatively agreed to sell to Missouri-based Ascension Health, the nation's largest Catholic healthcare system.

An emergency room is not a pressing need for Westwood, since residents generally go to nearby facilities at Caritas Norwood or Beth Israel Deaconess-Needham, Jaillet said.

A hospital or medical offices at Westwood Station could require a rezoning of the University Avenue parcel, subject to approval from Town Meeting. And the town would not accept a hospital, which by state law is exempt from property taxes, unless a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes arrangement was agreed upon first, Jaillet said.

"We have been crystal clear with everyone involved about this," Jaillet said. "The University Avenue development is a means to increase the town's fiscal stability. We are not going to subsidize a hospital. We would want to generate tax revenue."

Erica Noonan can be reached at enoonan@globe.com.