Although Edgar Silvey, 79, has led the Baton Rouge Clinic for 39 years, he is not one to plateau.
In fact, it’s just the opposite, he says.
“One of the things I discovered about myself at an early age was that I liked change,” CEO Silvey says. “That innate part of my personality has blossomed with the changes in healthcare.”
Change at the Baton Rouge Clinic, a physician-owned, multispecialty healthcare provider based in Baton Rouge, has been driven in large part by exponential growth. Silvey’s goal for the clinic was to grow too large to be acquired by another company.
The first step was to bolster the number of primary care and pediatric physicians. At that time, all multispecialty clinics had an inverted pyramid structure, which meant there was not enough primary care to support the specialties. Silvey worked with LSU and other training programs to recruit internal medicine physicians and by 1990 began merging with like-minded physician groups.
The first merger was followed by a whirlwind of affiliations and openings until the clinic reached 18 locations, including Prairieville, Opelousas and Monroe. “It began to hit me in about 2019 when we merged with a hospital medical group that we had gotten pretty big, that it’s a little bigger than the mom-and-pop store,” he says.
Silvey is frequently asked how he manages to lead a large group of independent minded doctors through challenging times.
“I have found it to be very easy,” Silvey says. The thing that is sacred to physicians is their autonomy to practice medicine the way they were trained to. I make sure we maximize that for physicians. If we are able to do that, they will help us on anything we ask.”
He is both a collaborative and a servant leader, he says. “I don’t try to make decisions in a vacuum. I want as much input as I can get from physician owners. I work for the physician owners, and I implement what they ask me to implement.”
When faced with complications, he recalls his dad’s succinct advice to “Keep it simple, stupid.”
Dr. Mortimer Silvey was one of four physicians who founded the clinic in 1946. His philosophy shaped his son’s approach to managing even the most potentially contentious relationships. “My dad taught me you can always pick a fight, but once you pick a fight it’s hard to go back,” Silvey says. It’s a lesson he applies to dealings with insurance companies and government payers alike, favoring persistent engagement over adversarial posturing.
The result is a culture that is, by any measure, remarkably sticky. Silvey estimates that 99% of physicians who join the Baton Rouge Clinic spend their entire careers there. Average employee tenure is 10 years or longer. The average patient sees the same doctor for eight years. A focus group conducted by a competitor once asked employees what made the Baton Rouge Clinic so successful. Their answer: it’s like a family atmosphere.
“The doctors are fantastic—they care about patients and about their employees,” Silvey says. “If you continue to attract those kinds of people, the culture takes care of itself.” He offers one illustration of how that culture plays out in practice: “The doctors will talk for months about what color the toilet paper is or should be, but if they’re talking about a clinical issue, they will address and solve it boom boom boom to make things better for patients every time.”
Everybody assumed Silvey would follow his father’s example and go to medical school. He was taking a chemistry final in college when he decided otherwise. “I loved the science, the chemistry, the anatomy, all of the stuff that makes up the science of medicine,” he says. “I just didn’t think I wanted to do that every day of my life. I was afraid it could be boring.”
His father, though disappointed, suggested aptitude testing. The results pointed strongly toward public administration, which led Silvey to Tulane University in New Orleans. A grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to Tulane in 1968 helped launch the Master of Public Health program in Health Services and Hospital Administration. The startup program proved a blessing—students had real input into shaping the curriculum, and Silvey found a field rife with change and intellectual challenge.
After Tulane, he bounced around briefly—New Orleans, Monroe, Atlanta—before being recruited back home to Baton Rouge General, where he spent nine and a half years. He joined the Baton Rouge Clinic in June 1988. “People who do what I do for a living might stay in a community for five or seven years,” he says. “I’ve lived in Baton Rouge 75 of my nearly 80 years, and I love it.”
He’s proud of many chapters in the clinic’s history: the way physicians worked overtime to help patients displaced by Katrina; the kindness extended by physicians to employees when 40% of the staff was impacted by the 2016 floods, and becoming part of the Mayo Clinic network in 2020 as the only independent clinic in that network, everything else being a hospital.
The most trying chapter of his tenure was COVID-19. “I just couldn’t imagine something like that happening in the United States,” he says. The early days seemed particularly precarious. When vaccines were released, the clinic had 30,000 patients who met the criteria to qualify for them and received only 1,000 doses initially.
Now Silvey is concerned about people who are avoiding vaccines, having been spooked by them during the pandemic. “Some of this behavior reminds me of when I was 10 or 11—we had a pretty bad polio epidemic in Baton Rouge, and so many people were afraid of taking the vaccine. After some very sad losses, people realized they needed to do it. I’m worried about measles and whooping cough. Polio has been almost wiped out worldwide, and I hope it doesn’t come back.”
Silvey is only the second CEO in the clinic’s 80-year history, succeeding George Brown.
Silvey has earned both the Medical Practice Executive of the Year Award and the Harry Harwick Lifetime Achievement Award, two of the highest honors in medical practice management. Under his leadership, the clinic has been named a Better Performing Practice by the Medical Group Management Association every year since 1998—a nearly unmatched record.
He is grateful, he says, for mentors and for opportunities. “Everybody says, well, you make your opportunities. But I’m not sure I totally agree. I was blessed that people gave me opportunities when I wasn’t looking, or they saw something in me that others didn’t see.”
Shunn Phillips, CFO and COO at the clinic, who has worked with Silvey for more than 20 years, says Silvey combines strategic vision with genuine care for people—leading with integrity, humility and a deep sense of responsibility to both patients and employees.
“He has become a true legend in our community, whose influence has helped shape healthcare for generations,” Phillips says, adding that she has had a front-row seat to Silvey’s tireless effort and commitment to making a difference.
Looking ahead, Silvey worries about Baton Rouge’s cyclical difficulty in attracting young talent. One key to recruitment, he believes, is getting serious about improving the region’s infrastructure while being proactive about broadcasting what the Capital Region has to offer: “One of the best-kept secrets in Baton Rouge is the level of medical care that takes place here,” he says.
Another local secret is Silvey’s retirement date, which is known only to his wife, Cheryl, and to Phillips, who will succeed him.
Silvey had once said he would never retire, but close friends lost in recent years changed his thinking. “I may need to take some time to smell the roses.
“We bought a little place in Pass Christian, and we like to spend time there; it’s peaceful and enjoyable. We’ve got seven grandkids and enjoy being with them. We still have friends we want to do some things with. I might teach, but I think I’m just going to enjoy slowing down a little bit.”
