The Baton Rouge Health District wants to expand its boundaries to include the Ochsner Medical Center under construction at The Grove along Interstate 10.
The proposal comes at the request of Ochsner and will go before the city-parish Planning Commission on Oct. 15. If approved, the eastern boundary of the district would be extended along Ward’s Creek and encompass the $100 million Ochsner facility that underway, along with The Grove, Richard Carmouche’s mixed-use development near the Mall of Louisiana.
The proposed expansion does not include the Mall of Louisiana, says Baton Rouge Health District Executive Director Suzy Sonnier, but that may be a possibility in the future.
Ochsner is a partner of the health district coalition, and its existing clinic on Summa Avenue, which the new center will replace, is already in the boundaries of the district.
“Remaining in the physical footprint of the health district core allows us to further relationships with our partners,” says Ochsner Baton Rouge CEO Eric McMillen in a statement. “There aren’t many cities in the country where competing hospitals work collaboratively to better the health of the people we serve.”
Other partners within the boundaries include Our Lady of the Lake, Baton Rouge General, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, the upcoming OLOL Children’s Hospital, Woman’s Hospital and more.
The new Ochsner complex will open in stages, beginning in mid-January with the medical office building, McMillen says. The surgical hospital is expected to open in the summer of 2019.
Meanwhile, the Baton Rouge Health District is still searching for a new executive director to replace Sonnier, who will be leaving this year, she says.
The health district is an initiative of FuturEBR, the city-parish master plan approved by the Metro Council in 2011. BRAF was tapped to spearhead the project and spent $700,000 to develop a master plan. Unveiled in 2015, the plan called for new roads and improved infrastructure to alleviate traffic, along with a four-year LSU medical school and a diabetes and obesity center.
Road work is underway for the district, along with a few planned commercial projects and hotels. Sonnier says district partners are also working collaboratively to develop best practices to combat the opioid epidemic.
