By Cynthia Pegram, The News & Advance, Lynchburg, Va.
Jul. 11–The new chief executive officer at Johnson Health Services wants to see the primary care practice recognized as a place that provides good care to all patients, regardless of income.
He’s concerned that many think of the Johnson Center as a place only for the uninsured, under-insured or low-income populations.
“This is, first and foremost, a full-service primary care facility for the whole community,” said Dr. J. Kweku Laast, who has been on the job for about a week at the Federal Street center in Lynchburg.
Laast is a physician-executive, and as such not part of the clinical care team. His education includes a medical degree from East Carolina University and a master’s in public health from the University of North Carolina.
“I’ve come to see the need for us physicians in the public health, medical services arena,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of programs get established with very little understanding of what the clinical part of what that particular condition is, so if something doesn’t work, it becomes the doctor’s fault.”
As a physician-executive, Laast said, he’s able to create systems that provide more care to more people than he could ever do providing direct care himself.
Laast succeeds CEO John Sniezek, who resigned last year.
For the past eight months, while the search was under way, longtime medical director Dr. Peter Houck has also worn the CEO hat.
He’s glad to relinquish the job to Laast.
“We’re especially happy with his background in public health, and the medical field. We feel this is a dual talent that he has that the 30 applicants for this position didn’t have,” Houck said.
“That’s why we’re so excited he found us and we found him.”
Houck is moving into the position of medical director of the rapidly growing pediatric service soon to be based in a new facility across the street. Dr. Joseph Teel, who has helped develop the obstetrics program, is now interim medical director for Johnson Health Center.
Laast comes to Lynchburg from North Carolina, where he was a main investigator on a federal grant on sickle cell disease, working to develop a community health center model for best practices in handling it as a chronic disease.
Laast said he would like to see the Johnson Health Center become an example of how any chronic disease, including sickle cell, can be treated by a community health center.
“I would like to … quickly elevate us to be a player in the models we would like to roll out nationally,” he said.
Laast said that people with well-managed chronic disease wouldn’t have to continually go the hospital for treatment or to a high-cost emergency department.
He sees the Johnson Health Center as having an opportunity “to be one of the leading community health centers in the country … very comfortable in playing its role of management of chronic
disease.”
It would be great, he said, if that in five to 10 years Lynchburg would be a place in which “access to private health care would not be a problem.”
Laast has an ongoing interest in African and African-American history. Born in Ghana, his own heritage is both African and Dutch.
His birthplace has the largest “slave castle” in sub-Saharan Africa, he said — fort-sized constructions that were holding sites for those captured and sold as slaves.
“One of the former governors of the castles was Dutch; that’s where my name came from,” he said.
Kweku is a Ghanaian name. When people from African nations hear “Kweku Laast” they know he is from the Ghana coast, he said.
Laast hopes to work with many organizations in the Lynchburg community to find ways to enhance patient care for Johnson Health Services.
“I intend to be involved in community in general,” he said. “We’re here for them.”
– Founded by Centra in 1998 to serve the downtown Lynchburg area and low-income populations, Johnson Health Services became an independent federally qualified health center in 2003. Run by an all-volunteer board of directors comprised of center patients and local civic leaders, Johnson maintains close ties to Centra.
– According to the Johnson Web site, about 13,500 patients use an array of medical services and programs at Johnson Health Services. The primary care center is on Federal Street, an obstetrics center is on Fifth Street and a dental clinic is in Madison Heights.
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