The most critical years in human development are birth to age 18. Children’s Wisconsin Primary Care is privileged to be part of this journey for thousands of Wisconsin’s kids and teens — a privilege we now have had for 30 years.
As we look back on 2025, Children’s Wisconsin Primary Care and Urgent Care have so much to be proud of.
Our deep commitment to quality is evident in the intentional visits by our Quality and Safety team to each of our clinics this year. Plus, a newly established safety core team builds from our foundation of quality to continuously enhance our culture of safety and improvement.
Our expanded reach is evident in new and significant ways. This includes offering primary care, integrated mental health, urgent care and imaging services to the second-largest pediatric population in Milwaukee at our new Good Hope Clinic. In 2025, we also opened the first urgent care clinic 100% dedicated to kids in Northeast Wisconsin at our Appleton Clinic.
Care for kids is best when quality and access are paired with dedication and compassion. Every member of the One Team across Children’s Wisconsin Primary Care has made an impact, whether it was a warm smile as a family arrived, calming words at an uncertain moment or a helping hand to a colleague behind the scenes.
Helping kids live healthy lives is meaningful, challenging and purposeful. The following report on our progress in 2025 reflects the impact of everyone across Children’s Wisconsin Primary Care and Urgent Care as we help kids reach healthy milestones, from their earliest years on.
Mike Gutzeit, MD
President, Primary Care
Children’s Wisconsin
Gil Peri
President and CEO
Children’s Wisconsin
Expanding Our Reach
Opening of the New Good Hope Clinic
In May of 2025, our new Good Hope Clinic opened. The new clinic expands services beyond primary care and integrated mental health to include all-day urgent care, lab and imaging services. The new clinic is triple the size of the former location, allowing Children’s Wisconsin to expand services in an area with the second-largest pediatric population in Milwaukee.
Urgent care services relocated from Mayfair Pediatrics to this new location. This important move places Children’s Wisconsin urgent care services on Milwaukee’s north side for the first time. Families can leverage walk-in urgent care for less serious illnesses and injuries that are normally cared for in a primary care setting.
“Our expanded services help our care teams provide the needed care when and where it can be most impactful. We are dedicated to expanding pediatric care, providing pediatric specialists and helping families have options close to home.”
— Michael Gutzeit, MD, President of Primary Care at Children’s Wisconsin
Expanding Urgent Care’s Reach to Northeast Wisconsin
Children’s Wisconsin opened a pediatric urgent care within our Appleton Clinic in October 2025. The new pediatric urgent care is open all day, seven days a week, providing an additional care option for children ages 0-18.
Benefits for kids and families include:
- Enhanced choices for timely, convenient pediatric urgent care when primary care providers may not be available or when an Emergency Department visit is not needed
- A pediatric-trained team in a child-friendly space specifically designed to support urgent care services
- Delivering on our commitment to enhance the health and well-being of all kids through our Connected for Kids partnership, a collaboration with ThedaCare and Emplify Health by Bellin. The partnership is focused on local access for our communities and providing tailored child and adolescent services that meet community needs while maintaining pediatricians and family medicine physicians as the medical home.
2025 by the Numbers
PRIMARY CARE
20
clinic locations
106 physicians
26 Advanced Practice Providers
347 total clinical trainees
PRIMARY CARE
280,833
total primary care visits
5,521 newborn visits
2,553 completed visits by adolescent clinics
PRIMARY CARE
160,003
preventive visits
102,053 acute visits
73,845 same-day visits
22,029 chronic, ongoing care visits
PRIMARY CARE
143,409
active patients across all clinics
14,520 new patients
URGENT CARE
7
urgent care locations
50 physicians
38 Advanced Practice Providers
Transfer rates to higher level of care <2%
URGENT CARE
95,493
total visits
7,852 telehealth visits
87,641 in-person visits
VACCINATIONS
221,694
total vaccines administered
51,740 flu vaccines administered
2,726 RSV vaccines administered
MENTAL AND BEHAVIORAL HEALTH
12,617
mental and behavioral health
visits seen in primary care
33,347 visits with
Behavioral Health Consultants
21,697 unique patients received
behavioral health support
TOUCHPOINTS
335,039
primary care nurse triage touchpoints
62,886 primary care and urgent care
referrals to specialty
Quality and Innovation
2025 Quality Goals and Results
Our primary and urgent care teams led the following quality improvement opportunities in 2025:
Adolescent immunizations. Adolescent immunizations1 are most protective when they are given on time, before age 13. For the first time, more than 35% of adolescents received all recommended vaccines on time. This equated to 1,300 more HPV vaccines in 2025 than 2024.
Antibiotic stewardship. Appropriate antibiotic use supports effective treatment while reducing the risks of side effects and drug resistance, making care safer.
Examples in practice include:
- Urgent care has consistently used shorter courses of antibiotics to treat ear infections. Seven days of antibiotics were prescribed 60% of the time for eligible patients, and use of 5-day courses increased from 0% to 38% during a pilot from January-May 2025.
- In 2025, 50.7% of primary care patients eligible for a shorter course received one, exceeding a practice-wide target set at 45%.
These improvements across both teams have led to nearly 7,500 fewer days of antibiotics for patients diagnosed with ear infections.
1 Human papillomavirus (HPV), meningococcal and tetanus/diphtheria/pertussis
Enhancements to Nurse Triage
A Nurse Quality Council was established to enhance standards for nursing practice in primary care. A multidisciplinary council composed of over 15 nurses, providers and leaders:
- Enhanced the telephone triage orientation course, expanding curriculum to include use of the nursing process and decision support tools
- Established clear expectations for triage practice
- Streamlined the triage audit process to ensure continued use of evidence-based triage practices
Piloting a New Transcutaneous Bilirubin Device
Neonatal jaundice is one of the most common conditions requiring evaluation in newborns. Traditionally, bilirubin levels are measured using a blood sample obtained through a heel stick, which can be painful and stressful for infants and caregivers and time-consuming for clinical staff.
In 2025, two primary care offices piloted the use of a transcutaneous bilirubin device. This noninvasive tool was used to screen newborns and, along with clinical decision-making, to determine if a blood sample via heel stick was necessary. During the pilot, 85% of patients screened with the new device did not require a subsequent heel stick.
Year Over Year Updates
Quick snapshots of updates on initiatives in 2024 to 2025
Continuous Learning for Our Care Teams
The urgent care team advanced clinical excellence through ongoing education and skill development at both local and national levels. This included monthly case reviews, hands-on procedure workshops and emergency simulation training.
Notably, our urgent care team is active at the national level within the Society for Pediatric Urgent Care (SPUC), holding two leadership positions, team members delivering multiple lectures and posters at the 2025 SPUC conference and contributing to the production of a national pediatric urgent care webinar series.
Primary care delivered an educational series across diverse topics — examples include diabetes management, artificial intelligence in health care and eye exams in primary care. Nearly all of this content was developed by our own pediatricians and their partners in specialty care.
Further Integrating Mental Health
In 2025, we standardized the use of the Patient-Reported Outcomes and Measurement Information System (PROMIS) and Universal Suicide Screening (USS) questionnaires across primary care. Our offices saw more than 95% compliance within three months of implementation, providing us with actionable insights about the mental health of our patients.
Advancing Health Equity: The Health Navigation Program
The Health Navigation Program aims to identify our patients’ most significant health needs and barriers and develops models to support families in addressing their needs.
2025 progress included a sustained decrease in our missed appointment rate by 6.9% across the metro Milwaukee region. This led to more completed visits, closure of care gaps and overall better care for kids. Two important tactics implemented in 2025 were:
- Coordinating transportation. Getting to and from clinic can be hard; our team coordinated more than 600 rides to clinic visits on behalf of families.
- Enhancing access. We launched a pilot at two primary care offices to offer same-day and next-day preventive care for families. This resulted in opportunities to close care gaps and welcome families at times that work best for them.
Since implementation of the Health Navigation Program, we are proud to report that well-child check compliance increased by 6.5% and immunization compliance increased by 10%.
Locations
Children’s Wisconsin offers 20 primary care and 7 urgent care locations. Urgent care video visits are offered statewide.
Urgent care offers both walk-in and video visit care. Families using walk-in urgent care services can reserve their space in line and wait at home until it is their time to be seen.
Urgent Care
- Appleton Clinic
Children’s Wisconsin Milwaukee Hospital
Primary Care
- Bayshore Pediatrics
- Bluemound Pediatrics
- Cedarburg Pediatrics
- Delafield Pediatrics
- Forest Home Pediatrics
- Forest View Pediatrics
- Franklin Pediatrics
- Good Hope Pediatrics
- Greenfield Pediatrics and Teen Health Clinic
- Kenosha Pediatrics
- Lakeside Pediatrics
- Mayfair Pediatrics
- Midtown Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine Clinic
- North Shore Pediatrics
- Oak Creek Pediatrics
- Pewaukee Pediatrics
- River Glen Pediatrics
- Southwest Pediatrics
- West Bend Pediatrics
- Westbrook Pediatrics
Urgent Care
- Appleton Clinic
- Delafield Clinic
- Forest Home Clinic
- Good Hope Clinic
- Kenosha Clinic
- Mequon Clinic
- New Berlin Clinic
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