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Chief Editor Smith Hartley:
I know one of your
newest initiatives is long termcare, so let’s start
with that.
Kathy Kliebert:
Well our three big priorities are
making sure BayouHealth and the Louisiana
Behavioral Health Partnership are working
and getting health outcomes. We are going
to continue to move forward with moving
people from institutions into communities
and the new part about that is the managed
long term care. That’s probably our newest
initiative. And the other part is just managing
smarter, with everything that we do.
I tell our staff that this is a year where we
are not really focusing on new things; we
are trying to make sure all the things we did
put in place, all the big changes we made in
managed care, are really working and getting
health outcomes.
Editor:
Let’s just start with the why. Why has
DHH decided to reform its long term supports
and services?
Kathy Kliebert:
Well they are the one part of
the population that isn’t in any of our man-
aged care systems presently. The reason they
were carved out initially is because they are
a complex population; they are very vulner-
able, have a lot of health needs. Rather than
just put them in a typical managed care plan
we knew that we would have to have compa-
nies that really had some expertise in this and
really knewhow tomanage the complexities.
Our initial thoughts were let’s just look at
including the acute care portion. However,