An initiative of the nascent Baton Rouge Health District is underway to identify health care needs in north Baton Rouge—the first step in trying to address the lack of access in the underserved community.
The Health District is working with the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, which created the district early this year, and an arm of Blue Cross and Blue Shield to do a data assessment of health care in north Baton Rouge. The assessment will help officials to better determine which providers are serving the area, where their offices and clinics are located, what types of health care needs are the greatest among the north Baton Rouge population and what transportation options exist to help patients access resources.
“We know there is a lack of a facilities, but we need to better understand what services exist,” says BRAF Executive Vice President John Spain. “We need to make decisions, but to do that we need good data.”
BRAF and Health District officials have been working on the issue for several months. In September, they went to Washington, D.C., to meet with representatives from Louisiana’s congressional delegation and federal agencies to discuss possible solutions to the relative dearth of health care facilities in north Baton Rouge. While there, Karen DeSalvo, a New Orleans physician who has served in the Obama administration as the acting assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, connected them to a new research institute created by Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
“They have access to incredible data sets, and they have developed a fascinating tool,” says Health District Executive Director Suzy Sonnier. “So they agreed to work with us on access to primary and preventive care as well as needs assessment for north Baton Rouge.”
The Blue Cross and Blue Shield team is not expected to deliver a report on the issue per se to the Health District, but, rather, is providing them with access to data and helping them collate it and understand it so they can formulate a plan about how to bring more primary and preventive care to north Baton Rouge.
The initiative marks a change in direction for the Health District, which was criticized early this year by some Metro Council members and north Baton Rouge activists for overlooking the underserved area. The district was originally branded as a distinct medical corridor located between Essen Lane and Bluebonnet Boulevard, where two major hospitals, dozens of clinics and providers, and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center are located. The idea was first outlined in the city’s FuturEBR land-use plan, and was largely seen as an economic development concept that would benefit the entire Capital Region.
Sonnier now says the Health District is more than just a physical location.
“We’re a coalition and though we do have a distinct district, we want to improve health outcomes all over Baton Rouge, and improving access to care is part of that,” she says. “It has never been limited to just the health district campus or the Essen-Perkins area.”
—Stephanie Riegel
