UW Health is the academic health system affiliated with the University of Wisconsin, serving patients across Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Based in Madison, the system has expanded significantly in recent years through new outpatient campuses, cancer care investments, and workforce development initiatives. Its operations include University Hospital, Eastpark Medical Center, American Family Children’s Hospital, UW Health Swedish American Hospital, and a growing regional network of specialty and community care sites.
UW Health is expanding rapidly across multiple facilities, including University Row and Eastpark Medical Center. What is driving that growth?
Since COVID, we’ve had unrelenting demand for our services. That demand is being driven by several things: an aging population, closures or constrictions of rural hospitals and programs, population growth in our region, and survivorship. More people are surviving cancers and chronic diseases that once were fatal, but they now need ongoing care.
Eastpark helped us meet some of that demand, but it didn’t solve everything. So we’re expanding operating rooms and procedural space at East Madison Hospital, building a second rehab hospital, adding a new floor to our pediatric hospital, building a new tower at University Hospital, and expanding University Row for primary care, urgent care, and specialty services. It’s all part of trying to keep pace with what we’re seeing.
What has Eastpark taught you about building a more coordinated, outpatient-focused model of care?
University Hospital sits in a dense metro center where there’s very little room for parking or expansion. Over time, specialists ended up spread across multiple sites, which made coordinated care harder for patients. Eastpark gave us the opportunity to rethink that model on green space outside the city.
We wanted patients to be able to come to one place, see multiple specialists, get testing and therapies done, and have a much more coordinated experience. During planning, we paused briefly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we used what we learned in that time to rethink the building entirely. We added research space, clinical trials, proton beam therapy, and theranostics. We even created a full cardboard mock-up of the building so clinicians could walk through it and redesign workflows, rooms, and waiting spaces. The biggest lesson was that designing around patients also improved staff satisfaction and recruitment.
The Isthmus Project was created to help move ideas from clinicians into real-world tools and technologies. What role should academic health systems play in driving healthcare innovation?
Academic health systems are uniquely positioned to lead the transformation of care. We are connected to a university, we have laboratory research, clinical research, innovators within our system, and partnerships across industries. Large-scale discoveries already had pathways through the university and WARF, but the Isthmus Project was created for what I call the “orphan innovations” — ideas from clinicians or employees that might not fit those traditional channels.
The project helps people determine whether an idea is marketable, patentable, or scalable. It’s also become an important workforce retention tool because clinicians feel their ideas are valued. So far, around a half dozen companies have spun out of it. The projects range from pediatric heart-monitoring devices to improved brain shunts. It’s part of building an ecosystem that can take innovation from idea to market.
UW Health is becoming one of the country’s more advanced proton therapy centers, including pursuing upright proton therapy. What made that worth investing in?
We’re an NCI-designated cancer center, and as we planned Eastpark, we felt we needed the most advanced technologies available. Proton beam therapy was one of them, particularly for cancers where precision matters and surrounding tissue damage has to be minimized, like pediatric tumors.
What made this different was the partnership with Leo Cancer Care. Traditional proton systems move an enormous multi-ton beam around the patient. Their idea was to keep the beam static and move the patient instead, with the patient sitting upright. It’s more comfortable, potentially more anatomically accurate, and far more flexible operationally. We’ll likely be one of the first organizations in the world implementing it. We’re also heavily investing in theranostics, where radioactive isotopes are attached to substrates that can be injected into the blood stream and will seek out and attach directly to tumor cells. We believe this treatment modality will become transformative not just for cancer, but potentially for pain treatment and other conditions as well.
Everyone talks about AI in healthcare, but where are you actually seeing it improve operations or patient experience inside UW Health?
A few years ago AI was caught between a hype cycle and a fear cycle. We tried to stay grounded and think of AI as a tool rather than a strategy by itself. The most successful use case for us today is ambient listening.
During a patient visit, AI listens to the conversation and automatically generates documentation. Instead of staring at a computer screen, doctors can focus directly on patients and explain things more clearly. The notes are often more accurate and complete than traditional documentation. We now have around 800 physicians using it, and many say they wouldn’t want to work somewhere that doesn’t provide it. We’re also exploring AI in imaging, including mammography screening, where computers may eventually become better at consistently detecting abnormalities.
UW Health’s WorkForward program is trying to rethink workforce development through apprenticeships and new training pathways. Why does the healthcare staffing crisis require a different approach?
Coming out of the pandemic, there was a national workforce shortage driven by higher demand, people leaving healthcare, wage inflation, and competition from jobs with easier schedules or remote work. We realized that simply paying more or improving recruitment wasn’t going to be enough.
So we expanded apprenticeship programs for roles like medical assistants, respiratory therapists, MRI techs, and others. Many participants already worked for us in areas like environmental services or food service. We pay their salaries, cover their education, and give them paid time for classes and studying. We’ve had around 750 graduates and roughly 1,000 participants enrolled, with very high completion and retention rates. Many participants come from historically underrepresented communities, so the program has also created real economic opportunity for families.
What is your biggest priority as a healthcare leader right now?
I’ve been a senior healthcare leader since 1995, and one thing I’ve learned is that you can’t let day-to-day problems consume all your attention. Financial issues, workforce challenges, quality problems — those things are always there.
You have to keep asking where healthcare is going and how your organization is going to evolve. Part of my job is managing today’s problems, but a big part is thinking about how we’ll care for patients differently in the future, how we’ll support innovation, and how we avoid simply following someone else’s best practice. I want us to become the next practice.
