Our History

Foundation: Nursing and Public Health

In the early days of our heritage, Ms. Deanie McWhorter, RN, provided the leadership and vision that would carry our organization through the formative years. Ms Deanie’s training and experience at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans, where she excelled in surgery and nursing, gave her the medical background to work with local doctors on complex cases. As Evangeline began to grow, Ms. Deanie hired nurses that were like herself: well trained, competent, energetic and devoted to serving others. Evangeline gained the trust of physicians and families around all of the Acadiana Region. Ms. Deanie helped form the organization that would become the Home Care Association of Louisiana and served on the original board of directors. She was recently inducted into the Louisiana Home Health Hall of Honor along with her husband and partner, Edward “Ted” McWhorter.

Over the past 45 years Evangeline has always had a drive toward innovation and research. This emphasis led to a startling and meaningful discovery affecting Public Health in Acadiana. One of the early research achievements of Evangeline Home Health was the discovery of a heretofore unknown gene pool of Tay Sachs disease in a small French community in Northern Acadia Parish. A baby with Tay-Sachs disease appears healthy at birth, and seems to be developing normally for a few months. Symptoms generally appear by six months of age. While symptoms vary from one child to the next, there is always a slowing down of development. Gradually, Tay-Sachs children lose motor skills and mental functions. Over time, the child becomes blind, deaf, mentally retarded, paralyzed and non-responsive to the environment. Tay-Sachs children usually die by age five. Together with Tulane Medical School and geneticist Dr. Emmanuel Schapiro Evangeline nurses tested over 1600 persons over a two-week period, and identified a carrier rate in excess of 5 % in the area. This effort was noted nationally in Newsday, The Los Angeles Times and national evening news programs. This effort was done at no cost to the community or the patients.

In 1996 Lisi was working on a Quality Team at Evangeline that was looking into Length of Stay for a certain subgroup of patients. They found a common issue in a majority of these patients: Low Vision and the inability to take care of activities of daily living. Over the next 5 years Lisi developed the HomeSight® Program, a turnkey training program for home health agencies to address low vision rehabilitation in the home. The HomeSight® Program was marketed nationally and culminated in over 100 locations providing the HomeSight® Program by 2004.

After the HomeSight® Program became successful nationally, Lisi began to expand the model to agencies she owned and operated in New Orleans, Texas, and Colorado. During this time Evangeline continued to grow and established its headquarters in Basile, La in order to better serve the metropolitan areas of Lake Charles and Lafayette. In 2012 Evangeline was contacted by Robert Massof, PhD, professor of Ophthalmology and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Massof is the founder of the Lions Vision Research Center at the Wilmer Eye Institute. Evangeline was invited to participate in a 5-year NIH funded study on A Comparison of Low Vision Outcome Measures. The study is in the last year and has been presented at conferences nationally and internationally by Dr. Massof.

Providing superior care requires a committed team. Evangeline is proud to have a team of dedicated individuals. Satisfied and trained employees are a priority. Since 2011 Evangeline has developed and continues to refine a robust employee enrichment program. Recently, Evangeline partnered with Chuck Ihli, DPT and Elite Home Rehab as Director of Therapy to prepare for the demands of new models of care including “bundled payments with hospital partners”. Together the partnership will develop new disease management programs and protocols for evidence based outcomes.