Dr Beau Raymond Shares Expertise on Public Health, Population Well-Being

Sidney (Beau) Raymond, MD, MMM, FACP, chief medical officer of Ochsner Health Network, examined ways for health care systems to prevent the onset of diseases during his interview at the 2023 Ochsner IVBM. He expressed the importance of understanding patient populations and how this knowledge can help propose treatment methods.

This topic was further explored during the presentation at The American Journal of Managed Care^®’s Institute for Value-Based Medicine^® (IVBM) on New Orleans, Louisiana on November 7, 2023.

Transcript

What should health care institutions prioritize to shift their focus upstream, prevent chronic diseases, and foster collaborations with others to improve overall population health?

I think where we are with the health system is that we need to start—and this is one thing I can say that I'm very happy Ochsner is helping lead the way on this—is that we need to start moving further upstream. We need to try to prevent people from having illnesses and disease, stop thinking hospitals or health care systems are about acute illnesses, and start taking care of populations before they have problems in the first place.

The thing I like about my job and my role is we're dealing with helping to influence populations that we care for. When we think about impacts we have, it's on a much broader scale about how we can help drive healthier behaviors, help have interventions earlier, and help prevent disease in the first place.

We know people are always going to have acute disease; they're going to have to come into the hospital; that's always going to happen. How can we prevent people with chronic disease from having to go into the hospital? We manage them better and they manage themselves better. We work together to make sure we're all on the same plan, working with a patient about what their goals are. What do they want out of life? How can we help facilitate them achieve those goals?. That's how we need to be doing it and we're doing that more and more.

I'm happy that I'm at a place where that's the priority is how we make a difference within the entire states and beyond nowadays. We're trying to influence how we are—we're ranked number 50; we don't want to be there. We need to make a difference and try to impact where our state is and move further upstream and reduce smoking, reduce other illnesses that we can help prevent by having healthier lifestyles.

So how do we do that differently? I'll say within healthy state, it's fantastic because I sit at the table, we just had a meeting the other day, I sit at the same table as the person who's the leader at a competing institution, from a financial standpoint. Together, we're working on how we can make a difference in the state. That's the kind of stuff that I think is fun and we can actually make a difference and impact lots and lots of lives throughout our state and beyond.