While Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center is preparing to break ground on a new emergency room at the site of its LSU Health North Urgent Care Center on Airline Highway in the next few months, the hospital is also moving forward with plans for a new urgent care clinic on Florida Boulevard.
The clinic will be developed on a six-acre site at 6815 Florida Blvd. and will replace the existing LSU Health clinic on North Foster Drive, which will close when the new facility opens sometime in 2018.
“We’re in the final design and development stages, and we’re looking at a two-year time frame,” says OLOL CEO Scott Wester. “We’re going to expand the urgent care center so it will be much better than what we have now (on Foster). This will really be a positive addition to the area.”
In January, OLOL acquired for $750,000 the long-vacant property on Florida Boulevard, which previously was the site of a Brian Harris Jeep dealership. During the regular legislative session earlier this year lawmakers approved a $10 million appropriation for the clinic in the state construction budget.
But the project sat on the back burner for several months until OLOL could successfully renegotiate its contract with the state to provide care to the indigent and uninsured, which now includes provisions for the new north Baton Rouge ER.
Now that the contract is signed, plans for the clinic, which is located between North Ardenwood Drive and North Donmoor Avenue, are again moving forward. LSU owns the North Foster Drive site of the existing urgent care clinic, which is about two miles away from the Florida Boulevard site. Wester says he does not know what LSU has planned for its property, but he says the hospital will not operate clinics in both locations.
—Stephanie Riegel
