With a goal of providing the best patient care serving six counties in Northwest Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Memorial Medical Center, a critical access hospital in Ashland, WI, partnered with Essentia Health, a regional healthcare system and Kahler Slater to create a new ambulatory care clinic addition to their existing hospital, and integrated cancer care center. Through this project, Essentia Health is redefining how they deliver ambulatory services in the rural Midwest.

Essentia Health also partnered with Spooner Health System to bring a range of new outpatient specialty services alongside the construction of the new critical access hospital in Spooner, WI. Identifying new opportunities and making partnerships were key to implementing this new approach to ambulatory care.

This ambulatory care re-boot and subsequent new operating system will allow Essentia Health’s eastern division, headquartered in Duluth, Minnesota, to extend its geographical reach and the populations it serves as part of Essentia Health’s bigger picture business strategy for finding new opportunities to bring Health services to new communities.

Kahler Slater and Essentia Health shared the powerful results from these projects in a Team Based Transformation presentation at the multiple Wisconsin conferences in 2017 and 2018.