When the coronavirus hit Louisiana early and hard, the high death rate in many parishes laid bare what health care providers already knew: Louisiana has longstanding inequities in care and an outsized share of people with health problems.
A new partnership between Xavier University and Ochsner Health aims to help address those inequities through two new graduate school programs that will train future health care workers to analyze data and counsel patients on making health care choices based on genetic information.
“The development of these programs reflects Xavier honoring our mission to strive for a more just and humane society through education,” said Anne McCall, the university's provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. “Instead of focusing simply on treatment in health and medicine, we are prioritizing health care and research in preventive medicine.”
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Health informatics, the process of identifying and interpreting health data, will be one of the programs and a key part of creating more equitable care.
“Data is the foundation of health equity work,” said Dr. Eboni Price-Haywood, medical director of the Ochsner Xavier Institute for Health Equity and Research. “You have to analyze it in a way that you can slice and dice and look at how care outcomes are different in certain populations.”
A data analysis by Price-Haywood during the pandemic, for example, found that three out of four Ochsner patients hospitalized with coronavirus were Black, which reflected the disproportionate toll on the Black population.
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The other program is for genetic counselors, which help families at risk for genetic disorders make choices about treatment. With the increased reliance on more personalized medicine using genetics, the need for genetic counseling is predicted to grow by 21% over the next decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A technology-driven approach to health care is in part driven by the switch to electronic medical records mandated by the Affordable Care Act, said Price-Haywood. The reliance during the pandemic on telehealth and self-monitoring devices for blood pressure and blood sugars has picked up, showing doctors and patients that some chronic diseases might be well-managed from home.
There is not yet a timeline for when the programs will be available, but they are part of a broader effort by Ochsner to improve Louisiana’s dismal health rankings, which consistently put the state at the bottom.
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Ochsner, which is Louisiana’s largest health system with 32,000 employees, has pledged $100 million over the next 10 years to create a healthier state. Other initiatives include growing the health care workforce pipeline by establishing programs for in-demand careers in nursing, which are short-staffed nationwide.
The goal is to bring Louisiana’s overall ranking by United Health Foundation from 49th to 40th by 2030.
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