Healthcare companies in Nashville: the headquarters, the care sites and how to find them

This report is for job seekers and investors sizing up Nashville's healthcare companies, vendors and partners who want to work with them, and B2B sellers whose customers are hospitals, practices and health services firms.

Two counts, both right

The Nashville Health Care Council's 2025 economic impact study, produced with EY, puts the local industry at more than 900 healthcare companies, 17 publicly traded healthcare company headquarters, more than 370,000 jobs supported and a $72.1 billion annual impact on the region. Those figures include headquarters staff, suppliers and the spending they generate.

The Census Bureau counts something narrower: physical locations that deliver care or social services. Both are useful. The Council's figures tell you Nashville is a headquarters city; the Census figures tell you how many local sites you could visit, staff or supply.

Nashville health care in Census data

County Business Patterns 2023 covers NAICS 62 (Health Care and Social Assistance) in the Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin, TN Metro Area (CBSA 34980).

What kind of care

The same dataset breaks NAICS 62 into its parts:

Social assistance (child care, family services, vocational rehab) is part of NAICS 62 but isn't health care in the everyday sense. Without it, the metro has 4,783 health care establishments and 156,821 employees. Pay varies widely: about $108,200 a year on average in physician offices, $84,800 in hospitals and $48,500 in nursing and residential care.

Size and location

In broader bands: 4,605 establishments have 1 to 19 employees, 896 have 20 to 99, and 231 have 100 or more. Nine of the 19 establishments with 1,000 or more employees are hospitals.

Davidson County has 43% of the establishments and 61% of the jobs, at 42.5 employees per site: that's where the big hospitals are. Williamson County, home to Franklin and Brentwood, has 1,029 establishments averaging 25.6, mostly practices and outpatient sites.

What the Census count leaves out

• Headquarters. An office that manages other locations of the same company is classified under NAICS 55 (Management of Companies and Enterprises), not health care. The corporate offices that make Nashville famous are mostly outside the 5,732.
• Government facilities. County Business Patterns excludes most establishments reporting government employees, so federal Veterans Affairs facilities and other public hospitals and clinics are largely missing.
• Companies versus locations. A health system with 30 clinics counts 30 times, and a clinician with no employees isn't counted.
• Health services businesses such as billing, software and staffing firms are counted in their own industries.

Employment is for the week of March 12, 2023.

Finding Nashville healthcare companies by name

The Council's directory lists hospital operators such as HCA Healthcare, Community Health Systems and Ardent Health, behavioral health providers such as Acadia Healthcare and Centerstone, and Brookdale Senior Living. For public companies, the SEC's EDGAR search shows each one's principal office address. The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce is a further source for local employers.

How to evaluate a Nashville provider or partner

1. Confirm the license in the state facility search, or the clinician's license with the Tennessee Department of Health.
2. Check the NPI record for the legal name, address and taxonomy (specialty) the organization bills under.
3. Look for a Certificate of Need history if the facility is new or expanding. Tennessee is moving some services from Certificate of Need to licensure in phases between 1 December 2025 and 1 July 2030, so check which applies.
4. For corporate partners, read the latest annual report (public companies) or ask for audited financials and references.

Selling to Nashville healthcare companies

Corporate offices are a different sale: system-wide contracts decided by procurement, IT, clinical leadership and finance, often with a pilot at one facility. If your product touches patient records, expect a business associate agreement under HIPAA (45 CFR 164.502(e) and 164.504(e)) before any data flows. For hospital buying in depth, see selling to hospitals, and for finding the right people, how to find decision makers.

Illustrative example. The seller, its prices and its win rate are invented; the counts are from Census data.

Harpeth Clinical Cleaning (harpethclean.example) cleans medical offices to infection-control standards. Its targets are physician offices with 20 or more employees: the Census file shows 292 of them in the metro. Winning 4% (12 practices) at $2,500 a month is $360,000 a year. Rather than mail all 292, it filters the NPI Registry for multi-physician groups in Davidson and Williamson counties and checks the Certificate of Need status reports for new outpatient sites opening in the next year. Bebop finds practices matching a description like that and drafts the first email.

Subject: Cleaning for [practice]'s new [city] clinic

Hi [first name],

I saw [practice] is opening a clinic in [city] this [season]. New sites tend to inherit whatever cleaning contract the landlord had, which rarely covers exam rooms properly.

We clean medical offices across Davidson and Williamson counties to an infection-control checklist, with logs your compliance team can audit.

Worth a 15-minute walk-through on [day] before you open?

[Your name]

Next step: for how hospitals buy and who sits on the committee, read selling to hospitals.