LSU and Baton Rouge hospital reach agreement

State News

January 25, 2010

Anonymous Picayune Item Mon Jan 25, 2010, 06:14 PM CST

BATON ROUGE, La. — A proposal to make Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center the new home for LSU’s medical education and hospital services in Baton Rouge is complete and will go to LSU’s governing board for approval on Friday.

Our Lady of the Lake would become LSU’s Baton Rouge-based teaching hospital, after the university shelved plans to build a $400 million replacement for the outdated Earl K. Long Medical Center.

If the deal is approved, Earl K. Long hospital, which serves the poor and uninsured, would close — probably by 2014 — and its patients would be admitted to Our Lady of the Lake. Existing residency and training programs also would move there.

LSU System Vice President Fred Cerise said the partnership agreement will go to the LSU Board of Supervisors for approval Friday. Scott Wester, chief executive officer of the medical center known as The Lake, said his board also must sign off on the agreement. And the Legislature’s joint budget committee also must endorse it.

Once the cooperative endeavor agreement is signed, it would take 30 months before LSU programs begin moving over to The Lake, Wester said.

The run-down physical condition of the Earl K. Long facility has long caused accreditation problems with hospital- and medical-education certifying groups.

“We think this gives us the answer to the facility problem and a platform to continue to maintain and grow the medical-education programs in Baton Rouge,” Cerise said.

Neither Cerise nor Wester would discuss financial arrangements required to make the deal work, saying that their boards needed to be informed first.

“This is not a financial windfall for any organization,” Wester said.

Under the proposal, The Lake would be responsible for construction of a 60-bed hospital addition as well as a trauma center capable of handling the most severe medical emergencies, Wester said. The Lake also would build a medical-education building and donate it to LSU.

LSU would construct an urgent-care center at its new north Baton Rouge medical clinic, Cerise said. He said LSU also would continue to operate outpatient medical clinics around the city with extended hours and days of operation.

Cerise said LSU must resolve how it will deliver obstetrics and prisoner care done at the Earl K. Long facility because The Lake does not want to be involved with either.

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