Children's Wisconsin / Children's Hospital and Health System Inc

Chhs is the parent organization of an integrated System of entities providing comprehensive medical care and social services to children from Wisconsin and throughout the country. The System includes Wisconsin's only freestanding Hospital dedicated solely to the care and treatment of children, as well as various other facilities providing inpatient and outpatient care for children with all types of illnesses, injuries, birth defects and other disorders. The System also includes extensive research, education and community outreach programs. On an aggregate basis, the entities within the System provided community benefits of nearly $181 million.chhs oversees and coordinates the activities of the various operating entities within the integrated System, through the provision of supportive and administrative services on a consolidated, centralized basis.

Chhs provides various outpatient Health care services. In 2023, there were 88,867 revenue generating visits to the organization's urgent care clinics, and 6,405 outpatient surgical cases performed at the organization's ambulatory surgical center, the surgicenter of greater milwaukee, llc (a disregarded entity for federal tax purposes).

As a Children's Hospital in an academic medical center, research is interwoven into the care we provide every day. Children's allocates a portion of its annual budget to pediatric research in order to stimulate research activity which is focused solely on improving child Health outcomes. This research is focused on improving diagnostics, discovering and testing new therapies, and improving the way we prevent and manage some of the most complex medical conditions. Physician-scientists, nurse-scientists, researchers and technicians at the Children's research institute (cri) seek answers to the toughest questions in pediatric medicine. This innovative culture helps to attract and retain the best and brightest minds to our organization. Since its inception in 2003, cri has grown to include more than 150 researchers spanning all diagnostic, medical, and surgical specialties. Together they form the largest concentration of 100% pediatric research in Wisconsin. Children's research institute provides infrastructure and financial support for pediatric researchers conducting child Health research. Cri's academic partners include the medical college of Wisconsin, uw-milwaukee, and marquette university. Types of support include the following:- supplemental grant support for early stage investigators- competitive pilot grants to help investigators test new ideas- shared services, including a pediatric translational research unit staffed by pediatric nurses trained on the complexities of regulated clinical research- dedicated laboratory space for pediatric researchersa few examples of ongoing research projects are described below.children's has significant efforts in childhood cancer research, including improving survivorship and quality of life for children battling some of the toughest forms of the disease. Ongoing laboratory research efforts include cancer immunotherapy projects, where our labs engineer novel antibodies and incorporate them into antibody-based products for therapy such as bispecific antibodies and chimeric antigen receptors that function to redirect potent immune effector cells toward elimination of tumor cells. In addition, our researchers are active with the therapeutic advances in childhood leukemia & lymphoma (tacl) consortium. This national consortium was established to develop and conduct phase i /ii clinical trials of new drugs and novel drug combinations for recurrent childhood leukemia or lymphoma. Our researchers also continue to participate in the cog (children's oncology group) consortium for clinical trials of novel pediatric cancer therapies.research in improving nursing care is also part of our research portfolio, including one project studying an intervention, to help parents engage with their infants in the nicu and the transition to home. This intervention, h-hope (Hospital to home: optimizing the preterm infant's environment), has established efficacy, and has a standardized protocol, making it ready for widespread implementation. The infant-directed component of h-hope provides auditory (voice), tactile (moderate touch massage), visual (eye to eye), and vestibular (rocking) stimulation starting when infants are ready for social interaction. This intervention can help to support early brain maturation, Health, and development for babies in the neonatal intensive care unit. In this nih-funded research, h-hope improved growth, developmental maturity and mother-infant interaction, and reduced initial hospitalization costs and acute care visits through 6-weeks corrected age. This research is now testing whether h- hope can be implemented and sustained in five diverse nicus. Additional researchers in the neonatal intensive care unit continue to improve understanding of persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn (pphn), a life-threatening condition which results from failure of pulmonary vascular resistance to decrease at birth. Impaired angiogenesis in the lung is a key contributor to the failed adaptation. Endothelial nitric oxide synthase (enos) plays a central role in the regulation of angiogenesis and pulmonary vasodilation at birth. Ongoing studies are investigating the contribution of enos dysfunction to impaired mitochondrial biogenesis and epigenetic alterations in enos gene expression in pphn, potentially leading to novel therapy development to restore mitochondrial biogenesis and angiogenesis in infants with pphn.researchers at cri are investigating ways to improve care for congenital heart disease patients. One project aims to improve understanding of pulmonary arteriovenous malformations (pavms), which are common sequelae of surgical palliation for univentricular congenital heart disease. They are studying a circulating protein (soluble vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 1; svegfr1), which they recently identified as a candidate factor that may prevent pavms. By studying the role of svegfr1 in vascular remodeling and pavm prevention, they anticipate that this new knowledge will improve understanding of pulmonary microvascular biology and may lead to development of targeted medical therapies for patients with univentricular congenital heart disease and pavms.researchers in our emergency department are studying ways to improve the treatment of pediatric pain for injured children. Fracture pain treatment for children is inconsistent and often inadequate. There is no clear evidence demonstrating which of the commonly used medications are most clinically effective. Cri researchers are leading a prospective multi-center, longitudinal comparative effectiveness study that capitalizes on the known variability in pain treatment to determine the most effective recommended analgesic regimen for children with fracture pain in the ed and at home. In this study, they are comparing patient-specific pain experience data over the continuum of care from the Hospital to the home to determine best practice. The overall goal of this study is to evaluate and provide evidence for both ed and post-ed pain treatment for all children with acute fracture-related pain.

Children's school nurse program provides full-time registered nurses for Health care services in 8 k-5 and k-8 milwaukee public schools at no cost to mps or to students and families, serving over 3,600 students annually who might otherwise not have access to Health care. The school nurses advocate for a collaborative and holistic approach to address the physical, mental, and social-emotional wellbeing needs of students. This work includes addressing the social determinants of Health by assisting families in accessing community resources through coordination with the community Health advocates and community connectors. The school nurses bring together parents/caregivers, school support staff, primary and specialty care providers, and mental Health providers to address and improve the overall Health and wellness of the students they care for. In addition to providing daily care to students such as medication administration, g-tube feedings and other complex Health procedures only a licensed Health care provider can administer in the school setting, school nurses provide many other essential services. Examples of other services include educating students and families on the importance of preventive care, conducting Health screenings including vision and behavioral Health assessments, assisting families with establishing medical and dental homes, communicable disease surveillance and reporting, chronic disease management, and assessing and developing school safety and emergency preparedness plans. As the Health expert in the school, the nurses also offer classroom education on a variety of topics such as mindfulness, hygiene, restorative practices, self-care and anti-bullying.an increasing number of students are entering schools each year with special needs and complex Health conditions (attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, diabetes, life-threatening allergies, asthma, sickle cell disease, and seizures) that require extensive intervention and coordination throughout the school day to keep kids healthy and in the classroom learning. As the only Health care expert in the schools, the school nurses play a vital role on the special education teams to advise and advocate for special education services necessary for students with medical concerns to access a free appropriate public education. For chronic illnesses such as asthma, diabetes, seizures or sickle cell anemia, the school nurses work with parents and families to create care plans helping guide the students to self-management by the time they reach middle or high school, with a goal of decreased urgent care and emergency department visits, increased focus on prevention and utilization of primary care providers. During the 2023-24 school year the school nurses were active team members on developing 24 behavior plans, 64 individual education programs and twelve (12) 504 plans for students with disabilities. For the 2023-24 school year, Children's nurses completed 6,013 student encounters from 1,610 individual students, serving about 48% of the total student population over the course of the 2023-24 school year. Transportation, behavior and attendance remained a challenge this year and of the total student population served by Children's Wisconsin school nurse program, approximately 58% met the criteria for chronic absenteeism. The school nurse team worked diligently to help ensure students and families had what they needed to attend school and be healthy, safe and ready to learn, including monitoring attendance, outreach to parents, and advocating for positive attendance interventions to get kids to school. Prior to the pandemic, there was a declining trend in the number of students who were up to date on vaccinations required by law for school attendance. Following the pandemic that trend continued and was made worse by the pandemic's requirements for quarantine, isolation along with decreased access to in-person Health care visits. In an attempt to prevent communicable diseases and improve the vaccination compliance rates, Children's school nurses, planned, coordinated and conducted outreach calls to parents of those students behind schedule on their vaccines, specifically those required for school. Using their established and trusted relationship with the families, the nurses referred students to local vaccine clinics or to the student's primary care providers. Overall, the nurses helped schools to achieve an 85% vaccine compliance rate across the schools served.since 2014 chhs partnered with Wisconsin's department of Health services and the department of children and families and established a foster care medical home program called care4kids to administer the coordination of comprehensive Health care services inclusive of medical, dental and behavioral Health care services for children placed in "out of home care" (a.k.a. "foster care") in kenosha, milwaukee, ozaukee, racine, Washington, and waukesha counties in Wisconsin. Upon enrollment into the program these foster care children have access to chorus community Health plan's ("cchp") provider network as cchp provides administrative and utilization services for care4kids programming. Through december of 2023, program enrollment was 2,850 which represented approximately 40% of the total out of home care population in the state of Wisconsin