BEAVERCREEK — Driving day after day to Kettering Medical Center to visit his late wife, Marcia, during her terminal illness, Bob Mills said he saw first-hand the need for a “major” medical facility in Beavercreek, his town of residence.

When Kettering Health Network balked at the more than $20 million that Mills-Morgan Development wanted for the 35 acres on which Beavercreek Medical Center would be built, Mills and business partner Sam Morgan agreed to sell it for $14 million, ensuring jobs and the medical center came to Beavercreek, KHN President Fred Manchur told a crowd of more than 700 at the hospital’s ceremonial groundbreaking on Wednesday, Aug. 5.

Mills-Morgan has done much site selection work for Kettering Health Network’s outpatient facilities.

Besides the 90-bed hospital, Mills-Morgan Medical Campus on Pentagon Boulevard would be home to up to 75,000 square feet of medical office space, said Frank Perez, KHN’s CEO.

The new hospital will have a birthing center, plus emergency care, general surgery, orthopedic care, cardiac care, critical care, and medical imaging and diagnostic services.

Greene Memorial Hospital in Xenia, another KHN hospital, stopped offering inpatient maternity services in July, saying an aging population and flat birth rates locally lessened the need for deliveries. Only 17 percent of expectant women from Xenia and the eastern half of Greene County picked the hospital for maternity services, according to KHN.

Greene Memorial Hospital will still have emergency, inpatient rehabilitation and behavioral health services, KHN said. Other services are under evaluation.

But KHN is committed to Greene Memorial, said Dr. David Carter, Greene Memorial’s immediate past chief of staff. That was a key reason its parent, Greene Health Partners, and KHN’s competitor, Premier Health Partners, did not go through with an affiliation in 2007. That deal, through which Premier would have contributed $50 million for new health-care facilities in Greene County, likely would have meant a new health-care facility between Beavercreek and Xenia, a scenario opposed in the Xenia community, he said.

Instead, Greene Health Partners affiliated with Kettering Health Network. KHN is paying for $10 million in upgrades to Greene Memorial during the next several years, including a $2.2 million cardiac cath and interventional imaging lab that just opened.

Development and population growth are more robust in western Greene County than anywhere else in KHN’s nine-county service area, it said, and growth at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and Wright State University will increase the need for a nearby hospital.

The new hospital would be “the most architecturally significant building in the (Beavercreek) community,” Perez said. Elements will include a two-story wall of water rippling down behind the information desk, as well as interactive art.

KHN in March said it was cutting about 55 positions in its operations, mostly through attrition, as part of a hiring freeze.