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Healthcare Journal of Baton Rouge
hats. I’m a Board of Trustees member also.
The CMO should be representing the hos-
pital and doing what I think is best for the
hospital. But a lot of times it has to do with
expenses. We are a not-for-profit hospital, a
community hospital—our resources are lim-
ited and everything wemake we have to put
back into the hospital. And then you have
physicians, and I’m a physician also, that
want certain things that we can’t afford or
it’s really not needed. I have to represent the
community and I’ve got to do what I think is
best for the community, which is make sure
that we provide the highest value product we
can at the lowest cost. This is a new role for
me. Before, I represented the physician, the
hospital was my adversary.And now I’ve got
to be on both sides. I’ve got to wear a differ-
ent hat for each role.
And actually at most hospitals, or the vast
majority, the CMO is an administrator. He
may be anMD, but the physician staff looks
at him as an administrator. I’m still practic-
ing and pretty busy at surgery, I didn’t really
want to be a CMO only. I still enjoy what I do
in surgery. I really wanted to take advantage
of the fact that the physicians might look at
me a little differently.
Editor
Could you talk a little bit about
where you think the future of hospital sur-
gery or the surgical experience is headed?
Olinde
Well, I think that, as we mentioned
before, being non-invasive is huge. We’re
doing a lot more less invasive, but that’s what
patients want.They don’t want to have some
big surgical operation. I think that there’s a
big push now towards office-based or ambu-
latory care surgery. Patients would rather
go to an outpatient ambulatory place, have
surgery, and go home.
I think there’s also a push now towards
less private practice. I’m in private practice
and I can tell you, I’m a managing partner
at my practice so I have tomanage the bills,
I have to make sure my office manager is
spending money correctly, and you know,
we’re not really trained to do that as physi-
cians. We didn’t really spend a lot of time in
business. I think that is causing a shift, where
fewer doctors are going into private practice.
That really is a little bit different in that we
have a lot more large private practices than
elsewhere in the country. But I think that a
lot of the younger, millennial physicians for
instance, really want to be contracted or be
employed by the hospital and just do what
they’re trained to do and not have to worry
about the bills.
I think the other thing, one of the real
problems, is there is some overutilization
across the nation—services that are done
that may not really be necessary—and we
need to really look at that, at the cost of
medicine now. I know at our hospital we’re
really looking at trying to go froma volume-
based to a value-based system. Trying to. I
mean, physicians make money by the more
they do, but I think it’s better if we can get
it where we provide the highest quality and
try to have the lowest cost possible. I think
that’s the big push, specifically at the Baton
Rouge General.
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