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Touro, Ochsner engage in healthy competition

Section: Health

Kate Moran

Call it the gas station phenomenon: that capitalist oddity in which businesses decide to cluster along the same block or intersection as their competitors, rather than spread out across the city to capture different streams of customers.

Take the two gelato shops in the 3000 block of Magazine Street. And the grocery stores along Tchoupitoulas Street. Now two of the city's largest private hospitals have announced plans to open imaging centers directly across the street from each other at the intersection of Napoleon and Claiborne avenues.

Ochsner Baptist Medical Center next month will open a 22,000-square-foot imaging center, where patients can go for MRIs, CT scans, ultrasounds, bone density tests and echocardiac stress tests.

Across the street, Touro Infirmary has planted two billboards advertising a 13,000-square-foot imaging center it plans to build next summer at the site of an empty Rite-Aid pharmacy. Touro will offer a similar panoply of services.

Do the opposing imaging centers indicate a newfound rivalry between Touro, an Uptown staple, and Ochsner, an Uptown parvenu?

Touro operated the largest medical center in the area until last October, when Ochsner Health System purchased the Baptist campus and began developing plans to open a 100-bed hospital, an imaging center, a medical building and a retirement home there.

Now Touro has encroached on Ochsner's territory with its plans to build the imaging center at Napoleon and Claiborne avenues, two miles away from its main campus on Foucher Street.

Warner Thomas, Ochsner Health System's president and chief operating officer, said he welcomes Touro's presence in the neighborhood.

"We feel competition is good," Thomas said. "The more health services in Orleans Parish, the better."

Leslie Hirsch, Touro's chief executive, said his intention was not to take on Ochsner head-to-head. He said Touro decided to build the imaging center at Napoleon and Claiborne because it had no room to expand near the main hospital.

"From our review of the marketplace for diagnostic imaging, we believe there is a great opportunity here," Hirsch said.

The site also was attractive to Touro because Claiborne Avenue feeds into the downtown medical district, where Louisiana State University and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs both plan to build new hospitals in the next five years. Hirsch said Touro's outpatient imaging center could benefit from the burst of medical activity downtown.

"We do not believe there is anything that will mirror our facility in its configuration, the way it will be designed, the aesthetics of it," Hirsch said. "We believe it will be unmatched in the New Orleans area."

Hirsch said physicians had the opportunity to invest in the new Touro imaging center, which will be elevated 4 feet off the ground to mitigate the potential for flooding. The window to invest is now closed, as Touro has already met its quota of physicians who can claim an ownership stake in the new center.

While Touro's activities are mostly centered on Foucher Street, Hirsch said the hospital is trying to expand its presence in the region. Touro already runs doctors' offices on the West Bank and in eastern New Orleans. He said the imaging center is the latest effort to extend that reach.

Ochsner, whose main campus is on Jefferson Highway, already has limbs and offshoots in the region, and Thomas said that is part of what makes the new imaging center unique.

Ochsner Health System maintains the most sophisticated electronic medical records in the region, and doctors working at any of its six hospitals and numerous clinics will be able to view the results of tests administered at the imaging center on Napoleon Avenue.

"It's not just a freestanding imaging center," Thomas said. "It connects to the rest of our system."

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