Jackson Health System is one of the largest public hospital systems in the nation.
Sam Navarro
snavarro@miamiherald.com
Jackson Health, Miami-Dade’s public health network, will soon open a new outpatient center in the Kendall area as part of its efforts to bring care closer to patients.
The Public Health Trust, the governing body that oversees the health system, gave the green light Wednesday for Jackson’s real estate team to finalize an initial $1.2 million five-year lease for a property at 13650 SW 131st St., near the Miami Executive Airport.
The center will offer urgent care, primary and specialty care, as well as a diagnostic treatment center, Daniel Chatlos, Jackson’s director of real estate services, told the Trust. The lease with Q Holdings West Kendall LLC, once finalized, is also expected to give Jackson the ability to extend the lease for up to 10 additional years.
“This is definitely an area of our community that is growing, that needs us,” said Amadeo Lopez-Castro III, chairman of the Trust. “We were running at over capacity in [Jackson South] so this, I think, would be a good way to continue to provide healthcare access.”
Jackson South primarily serves patients who live in Perrine, Richmond Heights, Palmetto Bay, Cutler Bay and other parts of southern Miami-Dade. There are also two UHealth Jackson urgent care centers, one in Country Walk and the other in Cutler Bay, that primarily serve patients in that part of the county.
Jackson Health is one of the largest public health systems in the nation, with seven hospitals, several urgent care centers, and — soon — one of the largest ERs in the nation. It serves as Miami-Dade’s public safety-net health system and provides care to everyone, regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay.
Jackson, like other South Florida health systems, is seeking to bring care closer to patients, a strategy to not only improve access to care, one of several factors that can affect a person’s health, but also to attract and retain patients and employees.
And the health system sees a future in growing southern Miami-Dade, an area of the county that is underserved.
Jackson South Medical Center, at 9333 SW 152nd St., renovated its catherization lab in 2025 as part of a plan to provide new and expanded cardiac care. Michelle Marchante mmarchante@miamiherald.com
Last year, the health system opened a newly renovated catheterization lab at Jackson South to treat heart and vascular conditions, implant pacemakers, and perform other minimally invasive procedures to prepare for growing demand for specialized cardiovascular care in southern Miami-Dade.
There’s no word yet on when the new Kendall center will open. Jackson Health, in a statement to the Miami Herald on Wednesday, said it expects the new outpatient center will bring “convenient, comprehensive care closer to the community,” referring to it as an “investment” that reflects its “ongoing commitment to improving access to high-quality patient-centered services for the residents of Miami-Dade County.”
This story was originally published March 25, 2026 at 1:44 PM.
Miami Herald
Michelle Marchante covers the pulse of healthcare in South Florida and also the City of Coral Gables. Before that, she covered the COVID-19 pandemic, hurricanes, crime, education, entertainment and other topics in South Florida for the Herald as a breaking news reporter. She recently won first place in the health reporting category in the 2025 Sunshine State Awards for her coverage of Steward Health’s bankruptcy. An investigative series about the abrupt closure of a Miami heart transplant program led Michelle and her colleagues to be recognized as finalists in two 2024 Florida Sunshine State Award categories. She also won second place in the 73rd annual Green Eyeshade Awards for her consumer-focused healthcare stories and was part of the team of reporters who won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for the Miami Herald’s breaking news coverage of the Surfside building collapse. Michelle graduated with honors from Florida International University and was a 2025 National Press Foundation Covering Workplace Mental Health fellow and a 2020-2021 Poynter-Koch Media & Journalism fellow.
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