CHRISTUS CENTER GETS ACCREDITATION CHRISTUS
Breast Center has been granted a three-year, full accreditation designation by the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers, a program administered by the American College of Surgeons. Accreditation is only given to those centers that have voluntarily committed to provide the highest level of quality breast care and that undergo a rigorous evaluation process and review of their performance.
This is the second consecutive accreditation the center has received. The center must demonstrate compliance with standards established by the NAPBC for treating women who are diagnosed with the full spectrum of breast disease. The standards include proficiency in the areas of: center leadership, clinical management, research, community outreach, professional education and quality improvement. A breast center that achieves NAPBC accreditation has demonstrated a firm commitment to offer its patients every significant advantage in their battle against breast disease. The CHRISTUS Breast Center is one of the only breast centers carrying this stamp of approval for excellent patient care between Plano, Texas; Jackson, Mississippi; Baton Rouge and Little Rock, Ark.
TWO FROM BRF NAMED ON SILICON BAYOU LIST
Two members of the Biomedical Research Foundation team have been named to this year’s Silicon Bayou 100 list.
BRF President and CEO Dr. John George and Entrepreneurial Accelerator Program Executive Director Dave Smith are included on the annual list of the 100 most influential and active people in tech and entrepreneurship in Louisiana.
George has a diverse background in geology, medicine and business. Before becoming CEO of the BRF, he was a successful businessman who co-founded a long term acute care hospital system that included 20 hospitals in nine states with 3,000 employees. When he joined the BRF in 2014, he saw the local and regional entrepreneurial ecosystem was missing some key ingredients to create new, high growth companies and good paying jobs. He counseled with Butler from the University of Texas at Austin IC2 Institute, which is one of the premier entrepreneurial think tanks in the country and who helped to establish Austin, Texas as one of the top cities in the United States for entrepreneurial growth. This relationship helped to form the BRF’s Entrepreneurial Accelerator Program. EAP provides a suite of services to support high growth entrepreneurs. It creates and refines business plans, assesses and screens opportunities, conducts financial analysis and modeling, and conducts market and industry research. In addition, George helped to establish North Louisiana’s first angel investment fund – the New Louisiana Angel Fund 1. It raised $2.675 million from 53 accredited investors to invest in North Louisiana based start-ups.
He also hired high growth start-up professional David Smith to oversee the EAP. George was instrumental in the transition of the former state run LSU Hospitals in Shreveport and Monroe to a BRF wholly-owned subsidiary named University Health System. This transition saved more than 3,200 jobs and an estimated economic impact of $800 million to North Louisiana. In its first year of operating it had positive impacts, such as improving earnings by approximately $80 million, reducing expenses to the State of Louisiana by $49 million as reported by the Department of Health and Hospitals and reducing clinic patient referral queues from 12,000 to 1,200.
