A Shreveport-Bossier City health care business focused on seniors expands again

The third of CareWell Senior Primary Care’s three local facilities has just opened in Shreveport at 2020 Bert Kouns Industrial Loop.

It joins CareWell’s initial locations, which opened four years ago on East Texas Street in Bossier City and on Youree Drive.

James M. Remetich, market president for care delivery, said its a growing industry. 

“The senior population is becoming bigger and bigger across the U.S. The shrinking portion is the high school population graduating and going to colleges,” Remetich said. “Colleges are struggling to get enrollment — seniors are becoming the bigger portion of the population.” 

To accommodate this growth, by the end of 2025, CenterWell Senior Primary Care anticipates 450 locations or more scattered across the country, 500 when you add their partner brand, Conviva, Remetich said.

The larger senior population isn’t the only thing fueling the expansion, Brian Byrd, the administrator of the Bossier City CenterWell Care, said. It’s that Humana Health, the insurance company that owns it, has made a conscientious decision to focus on removing barriers to senior care.

The healthcare system, Byrd said, is “incredibly difficult to navigate,” and not “patient friendly.” And there are more seniors needing access to it.

The Pew Research Center says roughly 62 million Americans are currently 65 and older. That number is estimated to grow to 85 million, fully 23% of the U.S. population, by 2054.

Keeping that population healthier just makes sense, Remetich and Byrd agree. It saves money for health care providers, insurance companies and seniors. It provides seniors a higher quality of life and a more active lifestyle.

CareWell Senior Primary Care is just as it sounds, a location for primary care physicians to dispense medical care, but it is a bit old-fashioned in the methods it employs.

Emphasis is placed on customer care. Patients get birthday and thank you cards from the center. They get calls to check on them and remind them about prescriptions and it goes farther still. 

“We take a unique approach in the sense that we take financial responsibility for the members. The members come in and we don’t necessarily collect revenue every time they come in,” Remetich said. “The way we’re successful is by not having those duplicate services performed. So really, it goes back to the primary care physician and the team really coordinated care for the individual.” 

In order to get an appointment, a person must be Medicare-eligible, either by age, disability or medical condition. Though Humana Health owns CareWell, Medicare and other insurance providers are accepted and patients are free to go to any hospital they wish.

Patient loads are low. Compared to doctors in practices who may have just 14 minutes to spend on a patient, CenterWell schedules each visit to last one hour.

“Our longer appointment time is not just for the patient but for our doctors to spend time to really communicate and to address multiple diagnoses or issues on that one visit instead of saying, ‘Well, we talked about two things, you’re going to have to come back.,'” Remetich said. “It really is a model to accommodate the needs of our population, and to remove the obstacles in accessing health care.” 

“One of the things we have found is sort of the duplicity in medicine,” Remetich added. “You’ll go see one doctor and they’ll send you for all these tests and then they’ll send you to another doctor and it starts all over.” 

Removing obstacles, Byrd said, could include things like finding a ride for the patient by sending a van or calling an Uber, keeping in touch with the patient’s other physicians, or understanding staying up-to-date with all of a patient’s medications. 

CenterWell Bossier’s Dr. Jane Tsung-Wen Wong Fetterer switched to geriatric care and moved to north Louisiana to be near her aging parents. She said seniors are a demographic that can be underserved.

“Usually we focus on the young, when they become elderly, they’re like a forgotten population and they’re usually frail and not outspoken in a way so they don’t get the attention that they need,” Fetterer said.