HJBR Jul/Aug 2025

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  JUL / AUG 2025 57 For weekly eNews updates and to read the journal online, visit HealthcareJournalBR.com Barrow St., respectively, in the heart of downtown Houma. The co-location of these programs brings enhanced convenience, collaboration, and con- tinuity of care to clients seeking behavioral health and developmental disability support. Pennington Biomedical’s Greaux Healthy Initiative for Louisiana Addresses Childhood Obesity Pennington Biomedical Research Center has publicly introduced its Greaux Healthy initiative, a public service effort designed to help improve Louisiana kids’ health at every age. Developed in partnership with the State of Louisiana, Greaux Healthy implements 35 years of Pennington Biomedical research and discoveries to inform tools, resources, and programming for children, parents, healthcare providers, and educators throughout the state. Greaux Healthy has developed, and contin- ues to expand, a variety of tools and resources designed to support childhood obesity preven- tion and treatment. Greaux Healthy covers four priority populations: expectant families and par- ents of infants, preschool-aged children, school- aged children, and adolescents and young adults. The Greaux Healthy program includes a school- wide promotion of healthy behaviors, physical education lessons with instant activities, take- home newsletters, and classroom lessons with corresponding activity books. These materials have been adopted by more than 20 schools around the state in regions including Baton Rouge, Shreveport, and Lafayette, with many more planned. Currently tailored for fourth-grade classrooms, Greaux Healthy aims to expand pro- gram implementation in the 2025–26 school year providing classroom resources from fourth through eighth grades. In Louisiana childcare centers, Greaux Healthy is offering education and support through train- ings that help the centers implement best prac- tices across their programs. These trainings have been completed at centers around the Baton Rouge area with plans to expand via training and implementation partners and self-paced online learning. For health providers, Greaux Healthy offers education on evidence-based childhood obesity treatment. Its efforts are supported by the Greaux Healthy Provider Hub, an online hub (https:// greauxhealthy.org/provider-hub ) that offers a free Childhood Obesity Prevention, Evaluation, and Treatment Toolkit and continuing education opportunities through the Improving Childhood Obesity Care webinar series. To reach Louisianans, Greaux Healthy is launch- ing a tour with its Healthy Moves bus traveling to all nine Louisiana Department of Health regions of the state to showcase ways the initiative can benefit every community. The Pennington Generation research study will also take part in the statewide tour, enrolling Loui- siana families who want to learn more about how physical activity, nutrition, sleep habits, and other factors affect children’s health and development. Greaux Healthy is overseen by a national scien- tific advisory board, with researchers representing Tufts University, the University of Florida, Duke University School of Medicine, Columbia Univer- sity, Temple University College of Public Health, and the Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Good News for the Health Insurance Companies: Dr. Oz and RFKAre Letting You Regulate Yourselves —Again By Dianne Marie Normand Hartley In a recent press conference billed as “Secretary Kennedy, Administrator Oz to Host Press Confer- ence to Discuss Groundbreaking Health Insur- ance Reform,” the topic was prior authorizations. We won’t go into the weeds — you’ve heard it all before. In 2018. In 2023. And now again in 2025. We weren’t in the room, but I imagine insur- ance executives were thrilled. Something along the lines of: “Thanks for not regulating us — of course we’ll begin to monitor ourselves. They’re starting to pop us out there.” Because when Stat News asked the final ques- tion of a press conference notably light on specif- ics — “Dr. Oz, insurers made a similar pledge in 2018 that wasn’t quite lived up to. What’s different this time around?”— Dr. Oz responded, “Secre- tary Kennedy alluded to that. There was another effort in 2023. I think two things have changed. Uh, I mean there’s violence in the streets over these issues. This is not something that is a passively accepted reality anymore. Americans are upset about it... “Secretary Kennedy made it very clear from the outset that we’re going to deal with this issue one way or the other. We have legislation pend- ing that would codify some of these changes. But I think the major factor is the industry real- izes that some of the things that are pre-autho- rized just don’t make any sense. And they now believe that because we could actually create an interoperable digital system, a connectivity with very agreed-on standards — this actually could become a real-time process, which takes a lot of money out of the system... “They estimated earlier today that it costs between $35 and $45 per documentation of pre-authorization for the doctor’s office. It costs the same amount for the insurance company for every single time. And there were 3.2 million doc- uments last year for just Medicare Advantage. So multiply the numbers and you begin to real- ize we’re throwing money away on administrative costs. Just financially.” That’s somewhere between $224 million and $288 million, if our math is right. Oz went on to say, “We’re also wasting peo- ple’s time. And we have the technology today to actually address this in a meaningful fashion. But the most important reality is the administra- tion has made it clear: we’re not going to toler- ate it anymore. So either you fix it, or we’re going to fix it. And I think they wisely have decided they should fix it.” LDH Launches Project M.O.M. with NewDirector The Louisiana Department of Health is officially launching Project M.O.M. (Maternal Overdose Mortality) with the announcement of the proj- ect’s director, website, and patient journey map designed to introduce participating hospitals, providers, and other stakeholders to this initia- tive. Project M.O.M. aims to reverse the current crisis of accidental opioid overdose as the primary cause of maternal mortality in Louisiana. “Accidental opioid overdose has been the lead- ing cause of pregnancy-associated death in Loui- siana since 2018, and this is a statewide effort to reverse that terrible trend,” said Deputy Secretary Pete Croughan, MD. “Every preventable death is