Children’s Health Announces Plans for $25 Million The Shops at RedBird Expansion

Children’s Health has unveiled plans for its long-awaited presence at The Shops at RedBird in southern Dallas, announcing a 40,000-square-foot specialty center to be built in the former Macy’s space.

The facility will add to the existing Parkland Health and UT Southwestern clinics in The Shops at Redbird. The details of exactly which services will be present in the center will be ironed out in the next 3-6 months, but Children’s Health Chief Operating Officer Dane Peterson says that urgent care, primary care, behavioral health, and a dedicated space for the Andrews Institute for Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine will be part of the final plan. With a lease secured and development plans for a more than $25 million renovation in the design phase, the facility is expected to begin seeing patients at the end of 2027.

“The specialty center allows us to have a place where families can receive a significant amount of their outpatient care. The ability for moms and dads and caregivers to know that Children’s Health is in their community with such a large investment is going to be a real game-changer for a long time,” Peterson says. “This is about investing in children, investing in the future, and caring for the health of children and their families.”

The growth in DFW has led to a doubling of the pediatric population in North Texas over the next 25 years. Children’s Health’s recent expansions at the Plano hospital, a specialty center in Prosper, and its work on a new $5 billion medical campus in the medical district reflect the country’s eighth-largest pediatric system’s desire to meet the needs of a growing North Texas.

Peterson says the specialty center’s goal is to better serve existing Children’s Health patients who travel farther north for care and to grow the system’s overall patient population. The new facility will have rotating staff and providers from other Children’s Health locations, but is expected to create about 75 new healthcare jobs, depending on which specialties are slated for the space.

Southern Dallas has long been a healthcare desert compared to the abundance of facilities on the north side of I-30, and the Children’s Health specialty center is meant to provide access to care closer to families who currently travel across town to the medical district for pediatric specialty providers. Data from the upcoming 2025 Beyond ABC report from Children’s Health shows that children in southern Dallas County experience higher rates of asthma, obesity, and chronic illness, along with other deficits in social determinants of health like housing and access to healthy food.

“The decision by Children’s Health to open a dedicated pediatric clinic at RedBird is a transformative moment for our community. It’s a clear signal that the future of our children’s well-being matters – and that access should never be a barrier,” says Royce West, a Texas state senator and longtime advocate for community health. “This expansion ensures families can get the care their children need, when and where they need it most, without leaving their community.” 

After its heyday in the 1980s, Red Bird Mall foot traffic declined like many American shopping centers. Recessions, changing demographics, and the rise of online shopping hurt the mall business everywhere, and Red Bird Mall was no exception. After a name change and a bankruptcy, the development looked like it might go the way of many dying shopping malls. But Brodsky and his team have been working to revitalize the space and have made healthcare an anchor tenant.

“The North star of this development has always been to provide the southern Dallas community with quality amenities, and that’s still what we’re doing,” says Shops at RedBird CEO Peter Brodsky. “That has never changed. The thing that has changed is the definition of an amenity. When I first started this back in 2015, it was not in the plan to turn RedBird into a major medical center, but it is an important amenity to any community to have easy and close access to high-quality medical care.”

When plans for a medical presence at Redbird were first announced, UTSW, Parkland, and Children’s Health were all announced as future tenants. Originally, Children’s Health planned to occupy the same building as UTSW in the renovated Sears space on the east side of the mall, but as time passed, Children’s Health and UTSW decided that a dedicated pediatric space was needed at RedBird.

The former Macy’s department store on the North side of the mall, located close to the existing UTSW and Parkland Health clinics, enabled Children’s Health to realize its vision. But turning a department store into a pediatric specialty center isn’t as simple as building exam rooms. While there is plenty of footprint for a specialty center, department stores are shaped like large boxes with no windows, which is not conducive to a modern healthcare facility that wants to feature natural light. So Children’s Health is knocking down about 40 percent of the existing Macy’s to create an L-shaped building that will allow windows to expose more of the building to natural light and create more parking directly adjacent to the facility’s first-floor entrance.

Brodsky says that turning aging malls into healthcare developments is becoming a more attractive option for developers. Usually built with good highway access in highly trafficked locations, large footprints, and plenty of parking, shopping malls meet many of the requirements healthcare centers need to be effective. Healthcare tenants also generate more foot traffic and staying power than traditional retail, and patients are responding to the retailization of healthcare, with more outpatient facilities closer to patients’ homes and less reliance on large mothership medical centers. He says the RedBird project was modeled after One Hundred Oaks Mall in Nashville, Tennessee, where Vanderbilt Health has built a medical center in several hundred thousand square feet of an aging mall. He sees the medical presence Shops at RedBird as a boon for the development and the community.

“When doctors and nurses, staff, and the patients come on the site, that helps drive the demand for restaurants and retail and other amenities,” Brodsky says. “It’s a win-win situation where it’s great for Children’s Health to be able to fulfill their mission and provide access to a part of the market they may not be accessing, and it’s great for RedBird to have them as a tenant because it repopulates the site.”

With proximity to UTSW and Parkland, the facility will become a holistic medical center that can provide care to the whole family. The RedBird location will increase collaboration between the organizations, which already includes the Joint Pediatric Enterprise between UTSW and Children’s Health, which is building a pediatric campus in the Southwestern Medical District adjacent to Clements University Hospital. The RedBird facilities will be able to share resources like imaging technology and staffing expertise.

“As we expand our specialty pediatric services across the region, we are committed to ensuring children and families can access the expert, compassionate care close to home,” said Christopher J. Durovich, president and chief executive officer at Children’s Health. “Within the RedBird community, we are creating the services and an environment designed specifically for children, positioning us to better serve all the children in our community.”

Author

Will is the senior writer for D CEO magazine and the editor of D CEO Healthcare. He’s written about healthcare fraud, Texas’ slow march toward marijuana legalization, and the future of healthcare in North Texas.