About ThedaCare

ThedaCare™ is the largest healthcare provider and employer in Northeast Wisconsin with more than 5,400 employees at 43 sites, serving more than 250,000 unique patients in a 14-county area.

ThedaCare is a community health system that includes:

• Four hospitals: Appleton Medical Center, Theda Clark Medical Center, New London Family Medical Center and Riverside Medical Center
• ThedaCare Physicians, a group primary care practice of more than 120 employed physicians at 21 sites throughout the service area
• ThedaCare On Call, a 24-hour phone service that provides health information, physician referral and after-hours answering service for ThedaCare Physicians
• ThedaCare Behavioral Health
• ThedaCare Laboratories
• The Heritage Peabody Community, senior living
• Orthopedics Plus
• Ingenuity First™, which provides direct contracting, occupational health, prevention services and customized health solutions to area employers.
• ThedaCare at Home, which includes nurse visitation and respiratory therapy services, durable medical equipment, home hospice and Cherry Meadows residential hospice.
• The Heritage Residential Living Community, Heritage Woods Assisted Living and Peabody Manor skilled nursing facility also are a part of ThedaCare’s extensive system.
• Joint ventures such as Gold Cross Ambulance, the Appleton Heart Institute, Quality Health Solutions and its multi-hospital virtual intensive care unit, and multiple partnerships with area physicians.

ThedaCare and the Center

In 2003, ThedaCare embarked on its journey to apply the principles and tools of lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System (TPS) to healthcare. The result was the ThedaCare Improvement System (TIS)—an organization-wide quality improvement initiative.

ThedaCare gained firsthand experience based on the application of techniques observed through engagement with like-minded industries, including healthcare organizations, which had already successfully applied lean concepts.

Through TIS, ThedaCare exponentially reduced the number of defects in its processes, improved patient outcomes, eliminated waste and developed revolutionary new models of clinical care based on these principles.

ThedaCare removed more than $23 million in costs without layoffs and achieved a significant degree of transformational change by continuously focusing on the value provided to customers (better outcomes with rational costs).

The ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value is built on these principles.

The ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value puts the competitive focus where it should be — on creating greater value for consumers…