Nashville’s HCA Healthcare has been recognized on the 2021 LinkedIn Top Companies ranking, an annual guide that identifies the best places for professionals to grow their careers and develop skills.

The ranking acknowledges organizations for investing in employee success, career development, and equity and inclusion.

“Since Day One of the pandemic, our top priority has been to protect our colleagues – to keep them safe and keep them employed – so they can best care for our patients,” says Sam Hazen, chief executive officer of HCA Healthcare. “The past year has brought tremendous challenges, especially for those working in the health care industry, and we are grateful to be recognized as a Top Company by LinkedIn for our investment in our people. More importantly, we are honored to support our 275,000 colleagues who continue to show up to serve their communities throughout this public health crisis.”

As cited by LinkedIn, at a time when hundreds of hospitals and health care systems were laying off or furloughing colleagues, HCA Healthcare implemented a special pandemic pay program that benefited more than 127,000 colleagues and guaranteed that colleagues who could not be redeployed to other facilities would continue to receive 70% of their base pay.

In addition to the pandemic pay program, HCA Healthcare also gave 100% base pay to those who needed to be quarantined and provided hotels for caregivers who preferred not to go home after treating COVID-19 patients. More than $200 million was spent to support colleagues with quarantine and pandemic pay through December 2020.

VU names residences for Rothschilds

Vanderbilt University’s newest residential college will be named Rothschild College in recognition of the $20 million gift that Marieke and Jeff Rothschild, BA’77, MS’79, made in 2016 to accelerate the development of the residential college system.

The Rothschilds’ contribution has helped advance a key pillar of Vanderbilt’s academic strategic plan, enhancing the undergraduate residential experience.

Rothschild College is under construction at the corner of West End Avenue and 24th Avenue South and is scheduled to open in the fall of 2022. Vanderbilt’s residential colleges provide an intentional living-learning community where students and faculty live alongside one another in a collaborative environment primed for engagement and discovery.

Jeff Rothschild is vice chairman of the Vanderbilt Board of Trust, which he joined in 2014. He serves on the board’s development, executive and investment committees, and he has served on the Trustee Campaign Planning Task Force. He has also been involved in the land use planning initiative, FutureVU, as well as the university’s work that created a trans-institutional initiative in data science.

He has co-founded several technology and software companies, including Veritas Software, and was vice president of infrastructure engineering at Facebook from 2005 to 2015. He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in computer science from Vanderbilt.

More student housing for Vanderbilt

Vanderbilt University has reached financial close on a mixed-use student housing project with Balfour Beatty Campus Solutions.

The 616-bed development, delivered via public-private partnership, will advance the university’s mission to provide modern, affordable housing proximate to the campus core for graduate and professional students, with co-curricular spaces to help them build community and foster interdisciplinary connections.

The new residential facility, set to break ground this spring and open in August 2023, will be located on Broadway between Lyle and 20th avenues, putting campus and other major points within the Midtown area within easy walking distance.

The development will feature apartment-style units in a mix of studio, one- and two-bedroom floor plans. The furnished apartments will be fully ‘turnkey’ with in-unit kitchens and laundry washer/dryer, utilities included.

The development also features a unique ‘Co-Lab’ collaboration space spanning more than 13,000 square feet and offering graduate and professional students a dedicated area for academic and entrepreneurial endeavors with additional group and private study spaces throughout the building.

Southern Festival of Books sets Oct. dates

The 33rd annual Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word will take place in-person, Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 9-10 at downtown’s War Memorial Plaza. Organizers of the event, the state’s largest literary festival, are planning activities in accordance with state and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention public health guidelines.

“With the support of our event partners and sponsors, we look forward to presenting an engaging and safe in-person festival that book-lovers across the state know and love,” said Tim Henderson, Executive Director of Humanities Tennessee.

The festival and its programming will be free for all attendees, as part of Humanities Tennessee’s commitment to foster community and civility through stories, history, arts and culture throughout the state.

Due to the pandemic, the Festival has been scaled back, with the event set for two days instead of the traditional three. All author sessions will take place outside on War Memorial Plaza, with the exception of a few sessions held in the War Memorial Auditorium, where seating will be limited and festival-goers will be required to use appropriate social distancing.

Online programming will also be offered leading up to the event.

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Nashville courts add electronic filing

Davidson County’s Criminal Court Clerk’s Office has become Tennessee’s first to offer electronic filing for attorneys in the state’s criminal courts system.

“The e-file system will improve the administration of justice in Nashville by allowing the expeditious filing of documents electronically without making a visit to the clerk’s office,” says Howard Gentry, Metro’s criminal court clerk.

“This will significantly reduce the amount of paperwork handled and transmitted, in addition to creating efficiencies for all users of the criminal courts, internally and externally,” he added. Gentry also recognized Justice Integration Services and Tybera for their partnership.

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Guy Fieri restaurant back on track on 2nd

Construction has begun again on the Chicken Guy! Nashville restaurant which was damaged in the Christmas Day 2020 bombing.

The project is located Second Avenue and Commerce Street.

FACE Hospitality, subsidiary of FACE Amusement Group, has announced work is again underway on the franchise set to open this summer.

The franchise is a partnership between FACE, famed chef, restaurateur and television personality Guy Fieri and restaurateur Robert Earl.

“We’re grateful for the strength of the partnership between Guy Fieri, Robert Earl and FACE, which has proven stronger than all the changes and challenges we faced last year,” said Bucky Mabe, CEO of FACE. “We are eager to finish out this project and bring Guy’s unique bold tastes and flavors to downtown Nashville.”

ACH moving HQ from Illinois to Franklin

Advanced Correctional Healthcare will relocate from Peoria, Illinois to Franklin.

As part of the relocation, the company will create 58 new jobs and invest $2.5 million in its new headquarters, which will be located at 720 Cool Springs Boulevard

ACH is the largest county jail health care provider in the United States. It operates health care teams and customized programs in a variety of correctional settings, including county jails, juvenile detention centers, mental health units, work release centers and drug rehabilitation centers.

In 2019, ACH was honored with the Better Business Bureau’s Torch Award for Ethics, which is given to companies that demonstrate best practices, leadership, social responsibility and high standards of ethics that benefit their clients, employees and communities.

ACH has also been certified by its employees as a Great Place to Work through Fortune magazine for six consecutive years. Further, ACH is currently listed as #6 in Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Healthcare and Biopharma.

PennyMac comes to Nashville, now hiring

PennyMac Financial Services, Inc., a publicly-traded residential mortgage company, says recruitment efforts are underway to hire prospective candidates within the Nashville Metropolitan Area.

While an office location has yet to be announced, PennyMac is currently looking to hire loan officers and other key leadership and support roles for its Consumer Direct Lending business.

Named a top three lender in the U.S. by Inside Mortgage Finance, the company continues to extend its workforce in order to serve its 1.9 million homeowners.

PennyMac has 15 locations nationwide with a dedicated workforce of over 6,000 employees. The company hired over 2,000 new employees in 2020 and plans to continue its growth throughout 2021.

Nashville Biosciences, Syntegra partner

Nashville Biosciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Syntegra have announced a collaboration to accelerate data driven innovation and research for drug discovery and development.

Nashville Biosciences was created to facilitate commercial R&D uses of VUMC’s comprehensive and growing BioVU biorepository, a de-identified biobank of millions of longitudinal medical records spanning over 10 years with hundreds of thousands of linked genetic samples.

Syntegra’s ability to create statistically accurate but non-identifiable synthetic populations from this data will create expanded opportunities for discovery, research and innovation through applications such as cohort expansion, missingness imputation and bias normalization, while adding a further layer of privacy protection for the underlying real-world data derived from VUMC’s electronic medical records. Syntegra and Nashville Biosciences will work together to lay the groundwork for these opportunities, initially validating the use of synthetic data to recreate a recent study done in collaboration between Nashville Biosciences and another collaborator comparing the performance of various treatments for type 2 diabetes.

Leeland Ekstrom, Ph.D., chief operating officer and co-founder of Nashville Biosciences says, “We are constantly looking for innovative new tools and approaches that we can deploy against our clients’ R&D problems. The Syntegra Medical Mind is an analytic approach that does exactly that, and we are excited to test it in this specific application.”