HJNO Jul/Aug 2026

DIALOGUE allow the plans to earn back that money through achieving health quality measure outcomes. It’s the first time that such a compre- hensive set of measures were released and we are now measuring both hospi- tals and health systems against. And so there are many HEDIS measures that are in there that have to do with say, diabetes care, behavioral healthcare, the continuity of care within health systems. We’ll begin producing a scorecard that the public can review later this year, and I’m very excited about changing the incentives that we use to help our health systems invest in their own processes. You can imagine you might have to hire additional staff, you would have to redo your workflows and your EMR, and the same thing goes in our health plans as well. We’re giving them the priorities for them to focus on that are specifically about the out- comes that we want to see, and we’re very excited by those. Editor I’d like to get more information on that. When is the first report coming out? Greenstein Later this year. Editor We’d like to run that. I think that’ll be very interesting. How well received was that from the healthcare systems? Greenstein When we started, there was a lot of say, suspicion, because the department over the last say, 10 years, could use improvement in their level of cooperation and collaboration. But in this case, we invited the quality personnel from all of the health systems and all of the health plans together. It was really interesting watching at each of these tables at this conference, you have health plan people and hospital people. We’re talking about real money and real patient outcomes, and there’s always a level of suspicion between the two. It’s like if you had a dog and you brought your dog to a dog park, and as soon as you let the dog off the leash, they spend the first couple minutes sniffing each other to check things out before they start playing and that’s exactly what happened with these healthcare executives. Everyone’s just checking each other out, not sure what they could say or what they could do, but by the end of this two-day session, we had a great degree of cooper- ation because everybody is interested in the same thing. They want to maximize the quality outcomes for their patients, and they want to maximize their payment and that’s essentially why we set the program up. And then, over the next six months, we worked very iteratively through a number of well- attended work groups. When LDH put out its first draft of the quality measures, we received what I would call substantial — or significant — pushback, which we answered with, “Okay, cool. What’s your idea?” And then we launched into this really great set of cooperative dialogues and we came up with something that was the con- sensus plan between hospitals and health plans and LDH. And I think every patient that gets served will be better because of that level of cooperation. We were immensely grateful to the health plans and the health systems that rolled up their sleeves and did work with us. We’re very happy about it. In July this year we will have the second annual Quality & Value Convention. We get speakers from around the country and the healthcare executives from our state all join in. We’ll be monitoring the development from last year’s program. We’ll be doing regulatory announcements fromWashing- ton, D.C., and then endeavoring on the next generation of quality measures. Editor Since your first tenure as health secretary, public health is more political. How does that affect your position and what feels more possible now and what feels more difficult? Greenstein Yeah, it does feel more political, and I feel like the work we do is absolutely not political. It is so essential for what we do and how our state operates. Your readers probably know, but most people don’t know the extent to which LDH touches so many quarters of our state’s commerce and living. Basically, all the food that you eat, whether it’s milk you drink, oysters that you have, a restaurant that you eat at, have all been inspected by specialists at LDH, and everyone we have — restaurant inspectors that are highly, highly trained for looking for certain things. We have a bovine quality department that inspects the quality of cows and milk. We have those that are probably right now out on a skiff in the Gulf sampling oyster beds, both the water and the oysters themselves to determine if they’re safe to eat raw or cooked or not at all. This is happening every single day and it doesn’t matter the politics. Those have to happen to keep our Louisianans safe, but also for commerce and our state. When it comes down to public health issues, almost all public health is apoliti- cal. We run our public health laboratories. We are continually testing water from both municipal and private water supplies. On any given day, you may see a boil-water advisory issued, another lifted, or a system taken offline, while many others are oper- ating well. We also run a bioterrorism lab, where we are constantly testing materials — much of which the public doesn’t know about because we do these things to avoid causing alarm when there is no reason to. And our epidemiologists are working very hard right now, without causing alarm, on issues like TB, measles, and, more recently, hantavirus, for example. And, by the way, we’re doing well. There is no reason for con- cern on those issues. So sometimes, there could be head- lines in the paper that make people think that our system is overly politicized now, and I would say that it’s not. The difference, to answer your question, between when I first came here in 2010 and now is that our 12 JUL / AUG 2026 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS