Officials with the Louisiana Department of Health and Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center are making significant progress toward developing a full-service emergency room in north Baton Rouge.
Following a speech today about Medicaid expansion to the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge, Health Secretary Rebecca Gee told Daily Report that negotiations between the two sides are going well for the development of an emergency room at OLOL’s LSU Health North Urgent Care Center on Airline Highway.
“We’re very far along,” Gee says. “It’s just a matter of The Lake making a firm commitment.”
So far, the hospital has committed to working with the state to try to make the deal happen, but has not agreed to any terms, she says.
Sources familiar with the negotiations say hospital officials are working through the numbers at the moment to try to figure out how much exactly it will cost to turn the facility—which houses both an urgent care and primary care clinic— into a full-service ER. Some of those cost estimates will depend on how much renovation needs to be done to the building to enable it to comply with state regulations, which are far more stringent for emergency rooms than for urgent care clinics.
Gee says her department’s licensing and standards divisions are working with hospital officials “to make sure everyone is on the same page” and that the state is committed to doing “whatever it takes to make it happen.”
Gee could not estimate how much the ER might cost, and officials with OLOL decline to comment on it. But developing a full-service ER for that area has been a top priority of Gov. John Bel Edwards, and his administration has been working closely with OLOL to make it happen.
Access to health care in north Baton Rouge has been a key issue with community leaders and elected officials since Earl K. Long charity hospital and Baton Rouge General Mid City’s emergency room closed in 2013 and early 2015 respectively. The Edwards administration has been working with state lawmakers from north Baton Rouge on the effort.
A proposal earlier this year by a private health care company to develop a freestanding ER at Howell Place near the airport in north Baton Rouge appears dead. Sources familiar with the negotiations tell Daily Report the Edwards administration is negotiating solely with OLOL, which already has a contract with the state to provide indigent care and has the area’s only Level II trauma center at its main campus on Essen Lane.
Officials with OLOL decline to comment today, except to say in a prepared statement from spokeswoman Kelly Zimmerman: “Our top priority is preserving the good health of families in our community. … We will continue to work with the Department of Health on how we can be helpful in their decision on how our community should expand additional services.”
—Stephanie Riegel
