Baton Rouge children's hospital leader on access to care | Louisiana Health | nola.com

Health Section Coordinator

Jonathan Brouk, Our Lady of the Lake Children's Hospital president, poses for a picture at OLOL Children’s Hospital on Thursday, October 24, 2024.

Jonathan Brouk, a St. Louis, Missouri, native, graduated from Tulane in 2007. After experiencing Katrina firsthand in New Orleans, Brouk felt more comfortable with the health care industry and became fascinated with the legal-side of the profession.

He went back to the Midwest for law school at Loyola University in Chicago to pursue a health-law-centric education. In 2013, after working in the health legal industry, Brouk moved with his wife, Allison, to New Orleans in his first private practice position in health. They have two young children, Betsy and Freddie.

Now, Brouk is president of Our Lady of the Lake Children's Hospital in Baton Rouge and works to lead the hospital, serve the community’s pediatric health needs and make sure "all children have access to high quality care, closer to home."

Jonathan Brouk, Our Lady of the Lake Children's Hospital president, poses for a picture at OLOL Children’s Hospital on Thursday, October 24, 2024.

What made you interested in health, and how have those experiences helped in your work?

My dad had a stroke when I was three years old and was a high utilizer of health care services until his passing just after I graduated law school. I helped my mom care for him through adolescence and into early adulthood when I moved away for school.

My dad didn't always listen to his care team's advice about lifestyle changes. He was a smoker and loved heavy seasoning and salt to a fault. However, he had a deep love and fondness for those that cared for him — from his vascular surgeon and the nurses in the hospitals to physical therapists and internists that cared for him later in life. His reverence for those who cared for him has always stuck with me.

What does the president of a hospital do? And what are some initiatives as a leader going forward?

I see myself as the strategic and operational leader for everything that Our Lady of the Lake is doing when it comes to child health. I have oversight and accountability for both everything that's happening within the four walls of our hospital on a day-to-day basis — all of the clinics that we serve kids in all around the greater Baton Rouge region.

I try to be a really present leader, so I spend a lot of time interacting directly with our team members. I really draw my energy from connecting with people and connecting with our front-line team members. I feel like it's our job as the administrative team to create the environment for our team to practice medicine.

On the day the hospital opened (five years ago), there were 34 patients who were taken care of in the hospital. Last year, in the last 12 months, we saw 80 kids a day in the hospital on average. To grow that much in that short of a time period, I think demonstrates that there is a big community need. There were times in the last year where every single bed in the hospital was full, and there were more kids that wanted to come here that we weren't able to accommodate.

A challenge for us going forward is thinking about how we can continue to deliver better care close to home. We are finding that as we add programs in Baton Rouge and surrounding regions, that the patients are there and they need the care that we're providing.

What are some technologies the children's hospital is implementing to improve care?

We are bringing a new, higher powered MRI on campus. They grade MRIs in their strength on a "tesla scale." The MRI machine we have now is 1.5 Tesla, and the one we're going to add is a 3.0 Tesla. Essentially, what that means is we are going to be able to take sharper, clearer images that will help our providers make diagnostic decisions. If we are making decisions about a 14-year-old who fell on the football field, and we need to decide whether we need to do surgery, we want to have the sharpest, clearest image possible.

We are also going to develop what's called an epilepsy monitoring unit where we can do a continuous EEG — when they put all these electrodes on your head and can study brainwave activity.

Most of the time, a seizure is visible, and your body is shaking. But you can have seizure activity in the brain when it's not manifesting on the surface. For kids that have epilepsy, sometimes there's both surgical and medical intervention. The more modern technique is to bring children with epilepsy in for a day, or even a couple days in the hospital, where we have them hooked up to this EEG technology. We can test changes to medications — a little bit lower or a little bit higher — and see if you do better and have fewer seizures. It'll be coming online in the next couple months. Right now, families have to go to Texas or New Orleans for that technology, but there are a lot of kids all over the state who need that kind of care.

What challenges does Louisiana face as a state?

Access to care remains a top priority for Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Health. There are families that are utilizing our emergency departments for primary and specialty care because they can't get appointments soon enough.

Meeting the needs of the community really is a core focus for kids — especially if you look at health indicators for children. We as a state unfortunately are 48th, 49th or 50th in just about every ranking. So there's a lot to do.

One of the challenges that we have to figure out as leaders is what to prioritize. Mental and behavioral health is a great example of a need that's really all across the country. It's become such a crisis. There's a statistic that one in five young people are dealing with some kind of mental or behavioral health condition, but less than half of them get the care they need.

The AAP, the American Academy of Pediatrics, puts out data on access to pediatricians. In 26 of the 64 parishes in the state, there isn't even one board-certified pediatrician. We're spending a lot of time thinking about how we can either leverage technology or partner with some of the rural hospitals to meet the needs of those communities.

We are piloting a project right now where our pediatric emergency department at the Our Lady of the Lake Children's Hospital can connect virtually to the emergency department at Our Lady of the Lake Assumption. If a kid walks in there, they can have access to a pediatric emergency medicine physician without having to drive all the way to Baton Rouge. We are breaking some of our own ground, but we are also looking at other states that are doing this well who are able to provide excellent pediatric care at scale.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Email Margaret DeLaney at [email protected].

Health Section Coordinator