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A lot is happening at the Baton Rouge Health District, from the development of cutting-edge data sharing capabilities to infrastructure enhancements and beautification.
Business Report recently sat down with Steven Ceulemans, the Health District’s executive director, to gain a better understanding of what’s in the works. Here’s what we learned.
Research Data Collaborative
In September, Pennington Biomedical Research Center and the Tulane School of Medicine were awarded a $1.3 million National Institutes of Health grant to support research-focused data sharing between Louisiana health care institutions.
The roughly $780,000 that Pennington received from the grant is funding the development of a network of data warehouses intended to provide anonymous and secure data sharing capabilities to the Baton Rouge Health District’s member hospitals—the Research Data Collaborative.
Right now, each of those member hospitals has an electronic medical record system in place that is tied to its own specific facilities. According to Ceulemans, the new data warehouses would allow the hospitals to share data much more easily, fostering collaboration and potentially enabling breakthroughs in research.
“This project is all about promoting innovation,” Ceulemans says.
Most of the project’s administrative requirements have been met, and Pennington is nearing completion of a prototype for the IT infrastructure that will be replicated within each of the participating hospitals.
The next phase will be implementation at the participating hospitals, a process that will take “the better part of the next year.” Health District officials are currently deliberating on whether to roll out Pennington’s prototype at all of the hospitals in parallel or to choose one initial site and work sequentially from there.
R.E.A.C.H. Gateway Infrastructure Enhancement Project
In November, the Baton Rouge Health District was awarded a $2.72 million Economic Development Administration grant for its R.E.A.C.H. Gateway Infrastructure Enhancement Project. An additional $680,000 in local funds provided by the city-parish and the Health District itself brought the total investment in the project to $3.4 million.
Ceulemans says the project aims to enhance entryways into the Health District in five locations and in three distinct ways:
- Signage/wayfinding will be improved so the individual campuses located within the Health District will be better connected.
- Intersections will be augmented to enhance accessibility and resilience.
- Greenscapes will be beautified to “inspire a cohesive Health District.”
“We want to create synergy between the clustered health facilities that we already have by elevating the gateways that connect them,” Ceulemans says.
According to Ceulemans, a funding agreement with the EDA has been signed and a contract to build the gateways is in place. The next major milestone will be the submission of an administrative plan for the grant, which will take place by the end of April. The Health District will then enter a planning phase that is likely to last the rest of the year.
Ceulemans expects groundbreaking to take place by the end of this year or early next year, followed by at least two years of construction.
“This is a great opportunity for us,” Ceulemans says. “This is the first public works project that the Health District is leading. Internally, it will allow us to build up the capacity and the expertise [required] for these types of infrastructure projects.”
MediRAIL
Also in November, the Baton Rouge Health District announced that it was seeking a $2 million grant through the Department of Transportation’s SMART program to construct a train stop for the anticipated Baton Rouge-to-New Orleans Amtrak passenger route—the MediRAIL project. The train stop would facilitate medically necessary evacuations in the event of a major storm.
According to Ceulemans, the Health District did not receive an award in response to its application, though he was advised to apply again later this year under a different program that may be a better fit. Health District officials are currently deliberating on next steps.
“I think it is a strong proposal and I think it still has significant merits,” Ceulemans says.
