Insights
Children’s Wisconsin: Reimagining a Digital-First Patient Engagement Platform
AVIA
Insights
AVIA
Children’s Wisconsin is pioneering a digital-first approach to family engagement by investing in a Family Health Engagement Platform designed to deliver a differentiated, data-driven experience. Recognizing gaps in measuring family engagement and care quality within their electronic medical record (EMR), Children’s sought a solution that would provide better visibility into these key metrics.
The Family Health Engagement Platform functions as an integration “power strip”—accelerating digital adoption while preventing unnecessary complexity within the EMR environment.
As the first pediatric health system to join the AVIA Network in 2018, Children’s Wisconsin faced a pivotal moment: their platform contract was nearing expiration, and it was time to evaluate its return on investment (ROI). They needed to answer critical questions: Is the platform delivering measurable value? And if so, how can data-driven insights be used to maximize that value?
During a focused eight-week sprint, Children’s Wisconsin partnered with us to:
To hear the full story, watch our three-part video series featuring Kim Cronsell, MD, Children’s Wisconsin, Acting Chief Medical Information Officer, and Sara Samson, AVIA, Senior Director of Digital Performance.
One of the biggest shifts at Children’s Wisconsin was building an operational foundation for understanding the impact of patient education. With AVIA’s support, Children’s conducted deep-dive interviews across four use cases, connecting directly with subject matter experts to uncover where engagement was working and where it wasn’t. The team mapped out how specific education formats were used in the real world, how patients were reacting, and where workflows could be streamlined. This ground-level perspective helped transform qualitative impressions into actionable data.
What they found was eye-opening: patient engagement was highest when education was delivered via text, bypassing portal logins and minimizing barriers to access. Spanish-speaking families in particular showed strong response rates across use cases, highlighting the platform’s equity potential. Internally, staff noted a subtle but powerful change: families started asking better questions. This insight (pulled not from dashboards, but from frontline experience) validated the platform’s impact beyond what could be seen on paper. For Children’s Wisconsin, measuring education isn’t just about analytics; it’s about listening to what teams observe and translating those patterns into smarter care delivery.
While evaluating the ROI of their Family Health Engagement Platform, Children’s Wisconsin discovered an issue that other systems may struggle with regarding their EMR, it would not fully meet organizational and patient needs. They felt that their platform couldn’t support the level of multilingual, multi-format patient education required by their care model. Spanish-language content delivery would have been particularly difficult to execute using native EMR tools. Even if they built workarounds, it would have required costly internal resources and resulted in inconsistent user experiences across the system. The decision to continue using the third-party platform was about feasibility, equity, and efficiency.
The deeper challenge lay in internal operations. Children’s Wisconsin needed to show not only that the tool worked, but that it could scale without adding friction. That meant calculating value not just from outcomes, but also from resource reallocation: freeing up integration teams, bypassing lengthy development timelines, and giving clinical staff tools they could use without extra training burdens. The AVIA team helped model what expansion would look like across multiple departments and surfaced a key realization: the platform’s value wasn’t just in what it did, but in what it prevented: development delays, fragmented workflows, and missed opportunities to engage patients earlier and more effectively.
After a year of measurable success, Children’s Wisconsin is looking ahead—not just at what the platform has done, but at what it can unlock. With AVIA’s support, the team modeled an enterprise-wide opportunity that projects upwards of $2.0M in value as education workflows are automated and scaled across more use cases.
Looking forward, the focus is on connecting engagement with outcomes, like tracking whether families who interact with materials are more likely to attend follow-ups or avoid emergency department visits. Their advice to other health systems? Know what success looks like before you launch. Be clear on your KPIs, define your measurement plan early, and be ready to pivot if you’re not seeing results. Children’s Wisconsin embraces a “fail fast” mindset: if a tool doesn’t deliver, move on. But when it does, double down with data, and scale with purpose.
