Nearly thirty companies will be competing to build new nursing homes in Florida. And with 1,700 applications for only about 500 new beds, competition will be fierce.

Florida just ended a 15-year moratorium on new nursing home construction.

Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Elizabeth Dudek said this could be the last big round of new nursing homes because of a cap.

“We’ll still have some need, unless we do some unusual circumstances, still be some small amount of need if we were to give out the full 493 this batch,” Dudek said. “But we’re coming really close.”

A nursing home lobbying group says Florida will need 20,000 new nursing home beds in the next 20 years because of the aging baby boomer population. Dudek, though, said that number may be high.

“We do have a lot of people who will be able to live in the community much longer than they did historically,” Dudek said. “So the 20,000 might be a high number.”

The state could also approve new heart and liver transplant programs in the Tampa area, and a new kidney and heart transplant program in South Florida.

WMFE is a partner with Health News Florida, a statewide collaborative reporting on health care.

Health reporting on WMFE is supported in part by AdventHealth.