One Year In: Delivering Big Benefits to Shreveport and North Louisiana
The historic 2018 agreement that created Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport, a new co-branded health system to serve North Louisiana, had multiple goals: improve healthcare services, address physician shortages, enhance medical education and advance critical research.
In 2019, Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport opened neurology and neurosurgery clinics at its new St. Mary Medical Center campus.
The historic 2018 agreement that created Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport, a new co-branded health system to serve North Louisiana, had multiple goals: improve healthcare services, address physician shortages, enhance medical education and advance critical research.
In 2019, Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport opened neurology and neurosurgery clinics at its new St. Mary Medical Center campus.
Dr. Mike Sewell, Chief of Hospital Medicine (left), created Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport’s hospitalist program, adding 12 providers in its first year focused on enhancing inpatient care and experience.
In short order, this model’s public-private partnership has delivered significant benefits to residents of Shreveport, Monroe and surrounding communities.
Those benefits include improved access to care, new infrastructure and technology, more physicians and increased staffing, greater inpatient capacity, newly expanded community clinics and more. One year into this groundbreaking partnership, our points of progress include:
- Improved access to care, with an increase in total patient visits of 71,000.
- In targeted areas, decreased by more than 30% the number of days until the next available appointment. Primary Care appointment wait time, for example, dropped from more than a month to less than a week.
- 125 physicians hired while adding 200 new jobs.
- Invested more than $68 million in infrastructure and technology in 2019.
- Upgraded the Epic electronic health record system.
- Launched TeleStroke and TeleICU programs to expand access to critical care services across North Louisiana.
- Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport earned recognition as the state’s first pediatric trauma program.
Among the most significant new investments: A $40 million phase 1 project to create the new St. Mary Medical Center campus. The new healthcare campus offers state-of-the-art patient care through its multiple clinics, operating rooms, laboratory and diagnostic imaging services. In 2020, the facility is opening a comprehensive diagnostic imaging center, outpatient laboratory and an ambulatory surgery center.
Although the Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport story is still in its first chapter, the trends are all positive as this public-private collaboration delivers a host of benefits to residents of North Louisiana. 