Atlanta City Council is joining Morehouse School of Medicine to expand healthcare infrastructure on the south and west sides, making strides to change the city’s history of “systemic disinvestment.”
By expanding hospital access, Morehouse plans to address longstanding healthcare deserts, improve access to emergency and trauma care, advance health equity, and create medical education and workforce opportunities for residents of Atlanta and Fulton County.
The Atlanta City Council unanimously passed a resolution on July 6 requesting the Fulton County Board of Commissioners to allocate $200 million to the project. This is on top of the $100 million commitment from the City of Atlanta and $400 million from Charlotte-based Atrium Health and Morehouse School of Medicine.
Expected to open in the West End by 2030, the facility will fill the gap as the city’s only hospital south of I-20.
Dr. Harry Heiman, clinical professor in the School of Public Health at Georgia State University, said the absence of medical care in Atlanta neighborhoods “made a bad situation dramatically worse.”
“What we’re seeing in healthcare is not a new problem. It’s a longstanding problem that has been wired by structural and systematic racism in ways that have put significant investments in healthcare infrastructure in areas where there are more white and more affluent populations,” Heiman said.
Heiman referenced racial segregation present in every major city in the U.S., stating that Atlanta was no different in redlining people of color.
“Atlanta has been a profoundly racially segregated city … going back at least to the 1930s and certainly before then. But it’s not only a story of racial residential segregation, it’s also a story of systematic disinvestment in Black and brown communities,” Heiman said.
As a family physician for 20 years in Marietta, Heiman saw discrepancies in healthcare after he began teaching at Morehouse School of Medicine in East Point. Hospitals in Atlanta are located near affluent, white populations and are disproportionately absent in areas that have historically had Black and brown populations, Heiman said.
Neighborhoods including West End, East Point, Collier Heights, and Lakewood have long been lacking access to medical facilities, specialty physicians, hospitals, and dental care.
Heiman’s message: barriers to healthcare, social, and economic supports south of I-20 didn’t happen by chance. It happened by design. Because of the closure of Atlanta Medical Center in 2022 and Atlanta Medical Center South in 2024, the urgency of action has become much more acute.
“We went from two trauma centers in the city to one, and Grady’s emergency department was already overburdened,” Heiman said.
Heiman is optimistic about Atrium’s partnership with Morehouse School of Medicine, as well as the the Fulton DeKalb Hospital Authority and Grady working on healthcare in Union City. But building hospitals doesn’t alone solve the problem, he said.
“In building hospitals, you hope to attract both primary care and specialty care providers to work there. If you really want to improve the health of those populations, you also need to meaningfully invest in access to healthy foods, walkable communities, transportation, infrastructure, job creation, and job training,” Heiman said.
