The Alice L. Walton Foundation broke ground on September 17 on a $700 million health care campus in Bentonville, Arkansas, seven years after efforts to bring specialty medical care to Northwest Arkansas first began. Covering 120 acres, the Whole Health Campus will include a 250-bed hospital, 40 operating rooms and a cancer center across 1.1 million square feet of facilities.
The project is backed by a 30-year, $700 million affiliation between the Alice L. Walton Foundation, Mercy and Heartland Whole Health Institute, with each committing $350 million, while Cleveland Clinic will oversee the campus’s cardiac care protocol. Tyson Foods Chairman John Tyson also announced a $50 million pledge from his family and company at the groundbreaking. The first building, a 709,000-square-foot Center for Advanced Specialty Care focused on cardiac, orthopedic and neurological services, is expected to open in 2029.
Whole Health Campus Builds on a Seven Year Effort
Alice Walton first proposed reshaping health care in Northwest Arkansas several years before the campus began taking form. The foundation, Mercy and Heartland Whole Health Institute formally established their partnership in September 2024, while the foundation acquired the site’s 100-acre core the following February, roughly two miles east of downtown Bentonville.
Walton, heir to the Walmart retail fortune, has previously followed a similar approach of supporting major philanthropic developments in Bentonville. She opened Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in 2011 and established Art Bridges Foundation in 2017 to broaden access to American art across the country. The Whole Health Campus brings that same model, with a Walton-backed foundation financing purpose-built facilities and partnering with specialists, into the health care sector.
The Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, a separate development located on the nearby Crystal Bridges campus, welcomed its first class of 48 students in 2025 and has since enrolled a second class, taking total enrollment to 96. The first cohort is due to graduate in 2029, the same year the Whole Health Campus is expected to open its first facility.
The Whole Health Campus is located west of Interstate 49, with access from Central Avenue and McCollum Drive, on land that the foundation has continued expanding since its original acquisition. In addition to the Center for Advanced Specialty Care, the initial construction phase will feature a parking garage, central utility building, gardens and trails that Walton described at the groundbreaking as a contemplation ground designed to make the surrounding community part of the campus.
Design Team Blends Global and Local Expertise
New York-based CannonDesign and Fort Lauderdale-based EDSA were selected in November 2025 to design the campus, working with Bentonville-based Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects, which also designed the nearby Alice L. Walton School of Medicine building.
The design includes gardens, pedestrian trails and stormwater elements integrated throughout the clinical buildings. According to EDSA principal Gregg Sutton, the intention is for the campus to feel less like a conventional treatment facility and more like a place centered on healthy living.
A Hub for Rural Specialty Care Across the Heartland
Walton and Dr. Claude Pirtle, president of Heartland Whole Health Institute, have described the campus as the core of a hub-and-spoke model intended to expand specialty care to rural communities throughout Arkansas and the broader Heartland region. A 2019 Northwest Arkansas Council report found that the region was losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually as residents travelled elsewhere to access specialty medical services.
Mercy is also expanding cardiac services at its hospital in nearby Rogers and pursuing Level II and eventually Level I trauma center status, complementing the specialist services planned for the Bentonville campus. The initial specialties identified for the Center for Advanced Specialty Care include orthopedics, gastroenterology and neurology, alongside the cardiac programme being developed with Cleveland Clinic. The campus is also expected to broaden access to virtual care for patients throughout the wider Heartland region rather than focusing exclusively on Northwest Arkansas.
Purpose-built specialty hospitals are also becoming more common elsewhere across Arkansas’s health care sector. In Little Rock, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences opened its own Orthopaedic and Spine Hospital in 2023, a 158,000-square-foot facility with 24 private inpatient units specifically designed for spine care, orthopedic surgery and pain management under one roof. Both developments point to a broader move among Arkansas health systems toward purpose-built facilities dedicated to specific specialties rather than adding new capacity within existing general hospitals.
Project Overview
- Project Name: Whole Health Campus (also known as the Bentonville Health Care Campus)
- Client: Alice L. Walton Foundation
- Location: Bentonville, Arkansas
- Project Type: Integrated specialty hospital and cancer center campus
- Project Value: $700 million, part of a 30-year affiliation agreement
- Site Area: 120 acres, originally announced as 100 acres in February 2025
- Total Floor Area: 1.1 million square feet
- First Building Floor Area: 709,000 square feet (Center for Advanced Specialty Care)
- Bed Capacity: 250 beds
- Operating Rooms: 40
- Status: Groundbreaking held September 17, 2026
- Target Completion: First building expected to open in 2029
- Key Partners: Mercy, Heartland Whole Health Institute, Cleveland Clinic
- Funding Sources: $350 million from the Alice L. Walton Foundation, $350 million from Mercy, plus a $50 million pledge from Tyson Foods
Project Team
- Client and Developer: Alice L. Walton Foundation
- Health System Partner: Mercy
- Clinical Care Protocol Partner: Cleveland Clinic
- Nonprofit Partner: Heartland Whole Health Institute
- Lead Design Architect: CannonDesign
- Landscape and Planning: EDSA
- Architect of Record: Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects
- Donor: Tyson Foods
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