As Ascension Parish’s industrial boom continues to draw contractors and skilled workers to the region, the demand for occupational health services is rising alongside it. NuREADY Health Network is expanding its footprint across the Gulf South to help companies manage workforce testing, injury care and compliance across multiple job sites. Major industrial construction and maintenance projects—from refinery turnarounds to new petrochemical investment—are bringing waves of contractors and skilled workers to job sites across the Gulf Coast. That surge is increasing demand for occupational medicine services that can quickly handle workforce testing, injury care and regulatory compliance as crews move between facilities in Louisiana and Texas. Sarah Taylor, a Prairieville resident, co-founded NuREADY and serves as clinic administrator at Gulf Coast Occupational Medicine. She says the network expects demand to continue rising as industrial activity increases across Ascension Parish and the Capital Region. “Oh, we’re absolutely expecting nonstop growth in Ascension Parish,” she says. “We know that Ascension Parish is booming.” NuREADY teams have recently supported contractors working at industrial sites across the region, including projects in Ascension Parish and maintenance work at refineries in neighboring parishes. “I love seeing Ascension Parish grow on the west side,” Taylor says. The network coordinates clinics, mobile medical units and on-site workforce services designed to support industries such as construction, petrochemicals, manufacturing and logistics. The model allows companies operating along the Gulf Coast industrial corridor to rely on a single provider for services such as workforce testing, injury care and compliance support. Taylor says the collaborative structure allows the network to respond quickly when large projects bring hundreds of workers to a job site. During a recent project, NuREADY collaborated with two clinics to process about 160 workers on a single job site. “We were able to team up and provide a united front from two opposing clinics, which was really cool,” Taylor says. Gulf Coast Occupational Medicine operates eight clinic locations across the Capital Region and can provide services in Texas and West Louisiana through the NuREADY partnership. The network’s mobile health fleet also allows medical teams to deliver testing, exams and injury care directly at job sites across the country. Building a regional network NuREADY was formally launched about four years ago after Taylor and Bryan Hollingsworth, owner of Business Health Partners, began expanding an informal collaboration that had developed over years of working in the same industry. “Brian and I became friends two decades ago, and we always stayed in touch and bounced ideas off of each other,” Taylor says. About a decade ago, the two began referring clients to each other when work crossed regional boundaries. “Probably 10 years ago, we started more and more calling each other if we had a client in that area that needed help, and sending business back and forth,” Taylor says. That collaboration eventually evolved into a coordinated network designed to help companies operating across multiple states access occupational medicine services through a single system. Patients can visit clinics within either partner network while maintaining access to a unified medical records platform. “It’s very unique, because typically in my industry of occupational medicine, the competition is stiff and it’s not always nice,” Taylor says. ...read more read less