OhioHealth Plans $700M Hospital at Former Big Lots Headquarters

OhioHealth plans to build a nearly $700 million hospital on the site of the former Big Lots headquarters in northeast Columbus, reusing part of the vacated corporate campus the health system bought for $36 million in 2025. The New Albany Methodist Hospital would open in late 2030 with 160 inpatient beds.

A vacated retail headquarters, bought for $36 million

OhioHealth, a nonprofit health system based in Columbus, paid $36 million for the former Big Lots headquarters in a sale that closed in April 2025, Franklin County Auditor records show. The 24-acre campus at 4900 E. Dublin-Granville Road sits in the Hamilton Quarter development off State Route 161 and holds two buildings finished in 2017: a four-story office of about 273,000 square feet and a 329,348-square-foot structure with distribution space and a parking garage.

The site came open after Big Lots unwound its Columbus operations. A December 2024 state WARN layoff notice shows the discount retailer planned to permanently terminate up to 555 corporate employees at that address, a mass layoff it expected to finish by April 2025 — the same month OhioHealth's purchase closed. When it bought the property, the system said no specific project was planned or funded at the time.

What OhioHealth says it will build

OhioHealth announced the hospital on November 11, describing a 600,000-square-foot campus with 325,000 square feet of reimagined existing space and 275,000 square feet of new construction. It would open with 160 inpatient beds and room to grow to 208, offering what the system calls advanced cardiac, neuroscience, stroke and trauma care, with inpatient capacity it compares to its Riverside Methodist and Grant Medical Center hospitals.

Construction is set to begin in early 2027 and finish in the second half of 2030. The system projects about 1,700 employees at full operation, with annual wages and benefits of at least $220 million, and estimates that 340,000 people live within a 15-minute drive. Those figures match WOSU's reporting, which described a hospital meant to serve northeast Columbus, New Albany and communities to the north and east.

Rezoned for medical use before it had a name

The land was cleared for a hospital months before OhioHealth named the project. The system applied on July 29, 2025 to rezone the campus, and the Northland Community Council's development committee voted 16-0 on January 28, 2026 to recommend approval of case Z25-036, which would rezone 24.71 acres to permit hospital, office and other medical uses.

The committee attached one condition: that a list of prohibited non-medical uses be restored to the site's zoning text. Columbus City Council passed the rezoning, ordinance 1271-2026, on May 14, 2026. The change kept the campus in a commercial planned development district — a zoning category that ties permitted uses to a negotiated, site-specific plan — while adding the medical uses it never carried as a retail headquarters.

More jobs than the campus shed

The hospital would reuse much of what Big Lots left behind. Of the 600,000 square feet OhioHealth describes, 325,000 — about 54 percent — would be reimagined existing space rather than new construction, a figure derived from the system's own numbers. That share of reuse is unusual for a hospital this large and reflects the campus's recent, still-modern buildings.

The project would also place far more workers on the site than the headquarters shed on its way out. OhioHealth's roughly 1,700 projected jobs is more than three times the up-to-555 corporate positions the December 2024 WARN notice said Big Lots would cut at the address. The two numbers measure different things — a future estimate against a finished layoff — but together they trace the campus's turn from retail to health care.

What is still unsettled

Much about the hospital is undefined. OhioHealth says the $700 million figure excludes the land, and that service lines beyond cardiac, neuroscience, stroke and trauma care are still being determined. The 340,000-resident service area and the 1,700-job and $220 million wage estimates are the system's own projections, not independently verified counts, and no residential rezoning tied to the hospital has surfaced in Columbus or New Albany records.

The next verifiable step is construction itself. OhioHealth has set the start for early 2027, and building permits filed with the City of Columbus — which appear in the city's public permit feed — would mark the point at which the plan becomes physical work on the former Big Lots campus.