A new plan for the future of the Baton Rouge General Medical Center system calls for transforming the Mid City campus on Florida Boulevard into a specialty hospital with a focus on rehab, outpatient and mental health care services for the elderly, and developing dozens of acres of vacant land at the Bluebonnet Boulevard campus with retail, health and fitness, and possibly even residential components.
Hospital officials unveiled the plan today, 18 months after beginning a comprehensive strategic planning process and more than six months after sending shockwaves through the community by shuttering the Mid City emergency department. Though the far-reaching, two-pronged plan leaves unanswered many questions, it puts to rest the big one that has been lingering over the hospital system since the ER closure last March.
“There is a rumor out there that we are closing Mid City,” Baton Rouge General President and CEO Mark Slyter says. “That is not going to happen. We are very excited about the future of Mid City.”
While the Mid City facility will remain open, its focus will change from that of an acute care hospital to a specialty facility with a range of post-acute care and ancillary services such as cancer care, rehab, skilled nursing, hospice, palliative care and geriatric-psych. The hospital also plans to double the capacity of its inpatient behavioral health services, adding 19 more beds to care for older patients with behavioral problems.
Even with those services, the Mid City campus will only utilize between 50% and 60% of its 800,000 square feet. Slyter says hospital officials are exploring a variety of options for the space that include partnering with other hospitals like Ochsner, developing the space in partnership with private developers, or working with the city-parish and the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to use it as a mental health assessment center.
“We’re going to look beyond health care to see if there are things we can explore with our elected officials,” says Slyter, who visited the offices of Daily Report this afternoon to unveil the plan. “We’re excited about going beyond and asking a different question. What can we do in health care? What can we do in healing services? Broader education? Broader retail? The sky is the limit.”
Hospital officials are also looking to develop property at the 142-acre Bluebonnet Boulevard campus, which will serve as the system’s acute care facility with an ER, ICU, regional burn center, women’s services and pediatrics, among others. The campus has 62 undeveloped acres, and hospital officials are in talks with various developers about their ideas to build a variety of mixed-use projects on the site.
At the moment, the hospital is focusing on a tract of roughly 10 to 15 acres that fronts Bluebonnet Boulevard. Slyter hopes development could begin on that site as soon as late 2016 or early 2017.
“We have a dream that would have people living and retail and healthy foods and restaurants and a healthy grocery and walking and exercise and fitness,” Slyter says. “Now we need to match that with what’s practical and what a developer can be successful with.”
The hospital is also looking at building out other undeveloped sites on the north side of the campus, which Slyter says would provide revenue stability for the system. Key to those projects will be the development of the Baton Rouge Health District, a still-conceptual project of BRAF that envisions the creation of an official medical district in the Bluebonnet-Essen area that includes the hospital, as well as Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
Renderings released by Baton Rouge General today suggest the Health District’s plans will call for the extension of both Dijon Drive and Picardy Avenue from Essen Lane to Bluebonnet, with a new roadway running perpendicular between them and connecting to Perkins Road.
“We need to relieve traffic between Essen and Bluebonnet, we need better ways to get between (OLOL and BRG), and we need more north-south access,” Slyter says. “This would accomplish all that and help us create a health-focused, walkable, accessible type of campus.”
—Stephanie Riegel
