If you become really sick in Livingston Parish, you have to leave—and seek medical care in Baton Rouge or Hammond.
True, a few primary care clinics have opened in recent years. But for anything more serious than the flu or common cold, you have to travel east or west to see a specialist, undergo tests or have any type of surgical procedure.
That situation, however, is about to change.
Hammond-based North Oaks Health System already has broken ground on a 47,000-square-foot complex that will be located off Interstate 12 at the Satsuma exit in the central part of the parish and will give patients access to a variety of outpatient diagnostic and treatment services.
Just four miles to the west, Baton Rouge-based Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, meanwhile, is planning an outpatient diagnostic facility and freestanding emergency room that will be located off I-12 at the Walker exit.
Officials of the hospitals say they’re moving into Livingston in an effort to better serve the growing number of patients who live in what has become one of the state’s fastest-growing parishes. Health care experts say the hospitals are in something of a race, competing for a larger share of a market that until now has been fairly evenly divided between Hammond and Baton Rouge.
Livingston residents say the motivating factors behind the medical building boom are long overdue, and they’re glad providers finally are moving into the parish.
“We wish it had happened sooner,” says consultant Delia Taylor, a lifelong resident of Denham Springs. “There’s no question the population is here, and there’s no question that we need it.”
That might be an understatement.
Livingston currently ranks second to Ascension among the state’s fastest-growing parishes. Its population has increased more than 25% over the past eight years to more than 118,000. And growth is expected to continue: By 2030, state estimates place Livingston’s population at close to 245,000.
But for all its growth, the parish is medically underserved. Years ago, it had a small hospital, Dixon Memorial in Denham Springs, which has since closed. Even when Dixon was open, it had a spotty reputation among residents and was considered a provider of last resort.
“You were basically signing your own death warrant if you had to go there,” Taylor says.
As a result, parish residents who live on the east side of Livingston typical travel to North Oaks in Hammond for medical care, and residents who live on the west side go to Baton Rouge, where they have several choices, the largest of which is Our Lady of the Lake.
In recent years, Livingston officials have taken steps to lure more providers, including a 2004 partnership with North Oaks to bring it to the parish. That year, the hospital opened two clinics in Walker. It opened a third clinic in 2007.
In April, it began construction on the $32 million North Oaks-Livingston Medical Complex. The two-story facility will be located on 30 acres in the southwest quadrant of the Satsuma exit and is scheduled to open for business in October 2010.
Granted, the facility will not be a full-service, acute-care hospital, but it will fill a gap in the parish. It will offer a range of outpatient and diagnostic services, including cardiology, laboratory, radiology and rehab. It also will include an acute care center, family medicine clinic and specialty clinic.
North Oaks is not alone in filling a void in Livingston. Our Lady of the Lake has been expanding into the parish as well.
OLOL has established a pediatric clinic in Denham Springs as well as a Lake After Hours clinic. In September, the hospital purchased 192 acres in the southwest quadrant of the Walker exit, and later purchased an additional 44 acres. The property will house physician offices, a facility for outpatient and diagnostic services and a freestanding emergency room.
OLOL remains in the development and planning phase of its project. But the target date to begin construction is late in the first quarter or early in the second quarter of 2010, with a scheduled completion date of late 2011.
Executives with the facilities say their expansions into Livingston Parish are designed to better serve their growing number of patients who live there.
“A good deal of Livingston Parish residents already come to North Oaks in Hammond,” North Oaks Health System Executive Vice President/COO?Michele Sutton says. “So we wanted to make it more convenient for them.”
That’s also what motivated Our Lady of the Lake to move toward building its new facility, according to CEO Scott Wester.
“It’s really two things,” he says. “To make sure they have good access to primary care services that are in close proximity to where they live, and to provide easy access for those who need emergency treatment.”
But it also has a good deal to do with economics. Livingston is a rapidly growing area, and the hospitals are trying to take advantage of an emerging market.
“Hospitals want to put facilities in a high-growth area because that’s where the people are,” says John Montessino, president of the Louisiana Hospital Association. “What you’re going to see more and more of is that they’re going to develop a lot more business activities over there, and there will be less and less of an excuse or need for the people of Livingston to come to Baton Rouge or Hammond.”
What’s more, outpatient hospitals and clinics are ideal feeders for secondary and tertiary care facilities. By developing relationships with patients now, both hospitals are laying the groundwork to grow their inpatient bases in the future.
“They’re trying to build relationships within that community,” says Jack Finn, a health care consultant, who headed the Metropolitan Hospital Council in New Orleans for more than 20 years. “The outpatient facilities will help grow those relationships.”
Experts say building outpatient facilities is the smart way to expand into the market because it’s far less expensive than inpatient facilities and is increasingly becoming the mode of delivery in health care today.
“They’re proceeding in an appropriate manner by focusing on outpatient delivery and not the inpatient side,” Montessino says.
But is there enough demand in the market for two facilities, especially with Ochsner Health System’s full-service hospital off I-12 at the O’Neal Lane exit [See related story, page A12]? More than enough, according to economic development officials in Livingston Parish.
“We were desperately needing the health care industry to ramp up in our area,” says Melanie Woodworth, the interim director of the Livingston Economic Development Council. “They may have competitive issues when it comes to workforce, but there won’t be an issue with not having enough patients.”
For their part, the hospitals say they’re not worried about competition from one another. North Oaks’ Sutton says even though her institution began planning its facility first, they always knew there would be others before long. The market is just too big and growing too fast.
“There is absolutely enough market for more than one provider,” she says. “We went into this with our eyes open, and we would have never committed the resources to building if we didn’t believe there was enough there.”
Wester declines to talk about the competition, but he insists there’s enough market share to go around.
“This is not an arms race,” he says. “It’s about meeting the needs of patients in Livingston Parish as we have been for many years.”
Aside from property signage along I-12, neither hospital is actively marketing or advertising its new facility. But parish residents are well aware of their presence in the market.
“I’m excited they’re both coming,” Taylor says. “It’s been slow out here for too long.”
Three’s a crowd?
When Ochsner Health System of New Orleans took over the 200-bed acute-care hospital two years ago at Interstate 12 and O’Neal Lane previously run by Ardent Health System, it was positioned in a prime location to take advantage of the growing Livingston Parish market.
After all, the facility was the closest full-service hospital for residents of the area—just three miles from the Denham Springs exit and eight miles from the Walker exit—and in bumper-to-bumper traffic as much as 30 minutes closer than Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center’s Essen Lane campus or Baton Rouge General’s Bluebonnet campus.
But now that OLOL and Hammond-based North Oaks Health System are expanding into Livingston with medical complexes that will include diagnostic and outpatient treatment facilities, specialist offices and urgent care centers, parish residents will have a lot more options and a much shorter drive when it comes to meeting many of their medical needs.
Ochsner officials say they’re not troubled by the encroaching competition, however. On the contrary, Ochsner Medical Center of Baton Rouge CEO Mitch Wasden predicts that as more health care providers set up shop in and around Livingston Parish, more patients will seek care there—instead of facilities in the center of Baton Rouge.
“I think you’ll see travel patterns change,” he says. “It’s kind of like when you put one restaurant in a place, it creates a little volume. But when you put four or five there, it becomes a destination.”
Of course, choosing a facility for a surgical procedure is a bit more complicated than picking where to eat for dinner, and one of the primary factors in the decision-making process is based on where the physicians themselves send their patients.
In that respect, Ochsner is able to hold its own. The health system has always had an extensive physician network that steers business to its hospitals.
“It’s always possible you will have competitors take market share,” Wasden says. “But we have such a large percentage of our business from our own physician group, it won’t have as much impact as it might otherwise have.”
What’s more, while the Ochsner facility at O’Neal Lane draws patients from Livingston Parish, it also pulls patients from all over the Capital Region who participate in the Ochsner network. They go there because it’s the only Ochsner facility in the area that is performing a full range of surgical procedures. It is also expanding, and will open a labor and delivery wing next year that is projecting to make about 1,000 deliveries in 2010.
Still, Ochsner has a relatively small percentage of the Capital Region market—about 11%, according to Wasden. While it would like to increase its share, Ochsner has long tried to position itself as a regional provider, with its flagship tertiary care facility in New Orleans that attracts patients from as far away as Latin America and Europe. In that respect, having feeder hospitals strategically positioned around the area makes sense.
“Our mission is to be one of the full-service health care providers in southeast Louisiana, from immunizations to transplants,” Wasden says. “So it’s very important for us in the Capital City to have a significant presence.”
It also means that, at least as far as Ochsner is concerned, the race isn’t so much for a share of the Livingston Parish or Baton Rouge market as it is for a piece of a bigger pie.
“When it comes to the really big stuff, people go to New Orleans,” says consultant Jack Finn, the former head of the Metropolitan Hospital Council in New Orleans. “So when you’re talking about providing tertiary care, that’s where some of the real competition comes in.”
