Officials with Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center say their plans for a new emergency room in north Baton Rouge at the site of the hospital’s LSU Health North Urgent Care Center on Airline Highway will provide the community with greater access to care.
As previously reported by Daily Report, Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne confirms that OLOL has reached an agreement with the state to develop a new ER in north Baton Rouge.
In a statement this afternoon, OLOL CEO Scott Wester says the new ER will be an extension of OLOL’s main campus ER, staffed by emergency physicians 24/7 with a full-service lab. He adds that having the ER on the site of the existing urgent care facility, which sees about 100 patients per day, “allows continual community education about the right care at the right time with the right resources.”
Gov. John Bel Edwards will officially announce the new ER and more details about it next week.
The ER deal is part of a larger agreement between the state and OLOL, which is the state’s partner hospital to provide charity care in the Baton Rouge market. The Edwards administration began renegotiating the agreements with all the state’s charity care providers earlier this year, saying the deals were too costly to the state and were riddled with other problems.
The deal with OLOL to include a north Baton Rouge ER in its contract with the state was hatched in broad terms months ago. But the two sides have been negotiating over the specifics and the money since June, as have all the partner hospitals with the state. Dardenne gave the hospitals until 5 p.m. Thursday to accept the state’s final offer. All except the state’s partner in Shreveport agreed to their new deals by the state’s deadline. The Shreveport partner received an extension until 5 p.m. today.
“I’m real happy to have this resolved, and I’m very satisfied with the results,” Dardenne says. “I think the partners will tell you, given the circumstance, they’re for the most part satisfied, too, even though they’re not getting everything they wanted.”
OLOL had one of the more generous deals with the state under the Jindal administration. Last year, it received some $116 million from the state to provide indigent care in the Baton Rouge market. Its new deal on paper is actually less than it received before—$111.9 million. However, OLOL will also receive $5.5 million to develop the new ER and $13.7 million in back payments it says it was due from the state, for a total of more than $131 million.
The agreements between the state and its partner hospitals are technically memorandums of understanding, short-term deals that will remain in effect only through the end of the fiscal year, June 30. Dardenne says the new MOUs lay the foundation for long-term contracts the state hopes to negotiate with the hospitals in the future.
—Stephanie Riegel
