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18

MAY / JUN 2017

I 

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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