Lou Fragoso serves as President and CEO of Manning Family Children’s, which is celebrating 70 years of caring for the children of Louisiana and the Gulf South this year. This marks a new chapter as Children’s Hospital New Orleans announced its transformational partnership with the Manning family, and renaming, earlier this year.
Fragoso has dedicated his 30+-year career to healthcare, serving in leadership roles at both Lurie Children’s in Chicago and Texas Children’s Hospital prior to joining Manning Family Children’s in 2019 as Chief Financial Officer and Chief Administrative Officer. Since his appointment as President and CEO in 2023, he has been instrumental in the expansion of specialized programs, recruitment and retention of top talent, improved access and patient experience, along with expansion of many of the hospital’s vital community programs.
To understand where Fragoso’s passion comes from, it is important to get to know his story. The eldest of three brothers, he grew up on the Southside of Chicago with loving parents who immigrated from Mexico 53 years ago. Growing up, Fragoso’s father worked at the same old-school Chicago meat-packing plant for 52 years, and his mother worked at a grocery store.
“We didn’t have a lot. My first language was Spanish, but my neighbors, Mrs. Walston and Mrs. Serovy, taught me English,” remembers Fragoso. “Until my parents learned English, I would often translate for them at doctors’ appointments, which most of the time was at the children’s hospital ER, … I looked a lot like one of the kids that we serve here at Manning Family Children’s today.”
Without the support and guidance of his family, his community, and neighbors, Fragoso acknowledges that he might have slipped through society’s cracks. With parents who led by example, hard work and community service are in his DNA. “What I’ve learned from my own experience, doing this work for more than 30 years — and try impress on others — is that no one is self-made,” Fragoso added. “We all need help to keep us on the right path… and it takes an entire community to raise a child.” Ultimately, this is what drew Fragoso to his role at Manning Family Children’s, he says. He wanted to be a part of a different kind of children’s hospital, to go deeper, and take care and compassion into communities, which he believes will create real change.
With a 70-year legacy and new chapter at Manning Family Children’s, Fragoso shared that it is much more than just a name change. “It is a declaration of a bold and urgent mission to move Louisiana from last to first in child health and wellbeing,” he says. For Fragoso, it is audacious, and overdue. But he says it is also what our state deserves, and it is absolutely possible.
Over the last six years, the hospital has made great progress, with 200 new physicians across 40 specialties joining the team from around the country, and 1,000 additional staff added. Manning Family Children’s has added more than 40 multispecialty clinics, built the only pediatric burn program in Louisiana, has the only pediatric trauma center in Greater New Orleans, is one of two level-IV Neonatal Intensive Care Units in the state, and serves as one of the largest and most comprehensive behavioral health programs in the country.
Just last year, Manning Family Children’s became the only hospital in the Gulf South and only one of a handful in the entire country that has a cure for sickle cell disease through curative gene therapy. The accomplishments don’t stop there. For Fragoso, “if we’re only solving medical problems and ignoring the social ones—trauma, grief, mental health, suicide, violence —we’re not changing health. We’re just treating symptoms.”
Manning Family Children’s has an unwavering commitment to care for every child, every time, regardless of ability to pay, and to bring vital services into the community to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. Such programs include the hospital’s ThriveKids Student Wellness program, which provides mental and behavioral health services directly in schools, and the expansion of the hospital’s child abuse pediatrics programs through the opening of the Morgan Rae Center of Hope last year.
“The problems that impact the children of our community need to become our problem,” shares Fragoso. “We run toward the problems, and our work in the community is our mission. It’s who we are.”
As the hospital moves forward, it aims to bring more resources to support its vital mission, to help even more kids, and to scale and sustain programs that will forge a brighter future for kids, making Louisiana a national leader in child health.
Learn more at manningchildrens.org
