Dr Anne McCall Discusses How Louisiana’s History Will Shape Xavier/Takeda Partnership

In part 2 of our interview with Anne McCall, PhD, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Xavier University of Louisiana, she discusses in greater detail the university’s 3-year partnership with Takeda, in particular how the directions it goes in will be influenced by the history of unequal health care delivery in the state.

Transcript

Can you discuss how the legacy of a dual-tiered health delivery system in New Orleans will affect the work of the Takeda partnership?

One of our strengths comes from our friends and partners. And at this point in Louisiana's history, Ochsner is the largest provider of health care to Medicaid patients in the state. We partner with everybody. And particularly in pharmacy, we have pharmacists at all of our hospitals, and we love our partners at the VA hospital. This is really one the strengths that Ochsner brings to the to the conversation, and it’s right down our alley. We have a center for minority health on our campus. We’ve done work in our community for forever. We have the oldest pharmacy college in the state. We have a health and wellness center in Harahan—a health and wellness center—for managing chronic diseases right by the Walmart there. So, we have our own kind of footprint in implantation, too, but this is going to take it to the next level.

And so all of the areas in which we’re developing programs in which we have students and faculty, we can now bring to bear on these various issues. And with the Takeda grant, it gives us an opportunity to make sure that everything that we do is data driven, right? We document well what’s going on. We have a record of how to scale things up. It doesn’t change what we do, but it changes dramatically how much of it we can do and the impact that we’ll have both here and, I think because of the model, elsewhere. Takeda is really making a big bet on us and we are with them, too. But they’re the ones who are spending the money. They’re really believing that we can do this, and we have confidence that we can, because at every point that we’re given an opportunity, we respond in a meaningful way.

The faculty core is challenged by all of these developments in big data, because there are always new software systems to learn, there are ways of looking at the big data that there weren’t before. It’s hard to keep up, and so for our faculty, we’re trying to make sure that they, too, can stay at the forefront in whatever their area is [and] have the skills and the knowledge to be able to take advantage of the vast stores of information that are there. I think many of us participate in large studies, and the information that is generated from them is game changing often. You find out that there’s a particular thing that causes disease or you find out that there’s a particular treatment nobody was really thinking about, but boom!, it pops out of the databases. So, we’re really eager to do this and our faculty are eager to learn more, be more involved. So it’s creating even more energy around this type of knowledge within the faculty we already have. And we’re going to be hiring more.

What will be the unique approach of this partnership to addressing health equity?

We’re trying to create models that take into account how we got where we are, what specifically we need to address that’s social as well as anatomical, physical in order to get out of there. And so, having a laser focus on all of these diseases and conditions from a health equity standpoint will change the type of knowledge that we produce. We haven’t always had a focus on this reality, and we know all too well in Louisiana that structural inequity has been at the heart of how we’ve lived here and how we’ve cared for people or not cared for people. Our present isn’t just coming out of nowhere. It’s coming out of long-standing practices and conditions.