Residents, business owners and city leaders joined emergency center staffers for a March 10 grand opening ceremony at Cedar Park Regional Emergency Center in Leander. Residents, business owners and city leaders joined Cedar Park Regional Emergency Center staffers for a March 10 grand opening ceremony at Cedar Park Regional Emergency Center in Leander.[/caption] Leander’s first freestanding emergency center, Cedar Park Regional Emergency Center, opened at 7 a.m. March 22 at the northeast corner of Crystal Falls Parkway and Lakeline Boulevard. The 9,500-square-foot facility is located at 1751 Crystal Falls Parkway. The emergency center is a department of Cedar Park Regional Medical Center in Cedar Park. It is the hospital’s first freestanding ER, said Laura Balla, Cedar Park Regional Medical Center director of marketing. The emergency center will be open 24/7 and has nine beds. Facility staffers include specialized emergency doctors and nurses who can treat patients with medical emergencies, such as compound fractures or heart attacks. The facility has diagnostic equipment and an imaging lab. It can transport patients by ambulance to Cedar Park Regional Medical Center, or CPRMC. CPRMC supports the center with critical care and inpatient services, Cedar Park Regional CEO Brad Holland said at a March 10 grand opening event. “This is not an urgent care [clinic],” Holland said. “It’s not meant to be a walk-in clinic. It is for emergencies and meets the same level of care in emergencies that you would expect for an emergency center attached to the [hospital] emergency room. … Think of a virtual tunnel, or virtual hallway that connects to the hospital. That is the same level of service and integration that we have at this facility to make it an outpatient department of the hospital.” Holland said the facility was built after CPRMC spent four years in planning. He explained why the emergency center includes the name Cedar Park instead of Leander. “It’s called [Cedar Park Regional Emergency Center] for a reason, because it has to meet all the requirements and services that we provide at the hospital,” Holland said. “To be able to do that, we have to be branded like the hospital.” Holland said CPRMC officials wanted to build in a growing retail corridor in Leander. The intersection of East Crystal Falls and Lakeline is the site of a new shopping center, Crystal Falls Town Center. The development will include anchor tenant Randalls as well as a Randalls gas station, a freestanding restaurant and 94,000 square feet of retail space. Thousands of homes in the Crystal Falls neighborhood are located west of the emergency center. A new neighborhood, Mason Hills, is being constructed north of the emergency center on Lakeline Boulevard. “Cedar Park Regional Medical Center, with the acquisition of this land, helped boost the property values in this community as well,” Holland said. “We wanted this site in this community because of the importance of Leander to the hospital.”