WED AM News: Children’s Wisconsin embracing AI applications in health care, leader says; UW SMPH touting top-tier ranking for primary care

April 8, 2026

— Children’s Wisconsin is taking a measured approach to integrating AI, embracing the technology’s applications in medicine while remaining cautious about potential pitfalls.

That’s according to President and CEO Gil Peri, who addressed members of the Rotary Club of Milwaukee yesterday during the group’s latest meeting.

The health system is currently developing its strategic roadmap, which will be released by the end of the year. Peri said a major element of that plan involves “adopting a lot more technology to expand our care model” in the state.

He emphasized the potential for AI to help care teams “work top-of-scope” by taking over certain tasks and freeing up their time.

“If I can eliminate 20% of their daily workload that is maybe bottom of scope — not important, waste of time in their view, they will tell us that — then that means they spend more time with kids,” he said. “Or more time at home, or going to a soccer game that fills their bucket with joy, and comes back refreshed the next day.”

At the same time, the health system is exploring the use of AI in clinical applications, to improve decision-making speed and effectiveness.

“You see health care lagging a lot in AI, because of all the regulatory and risk we have. If we don’t do it right, it’s not like it’s a widget, we’re talking about somebody’s life,” he said. “So we’re very careful about it. That being said, we are making sure we are embracing it and understanding where there’s evidence that it works, we are going to be adopting it.”

Peri also noted potential applications for AI in community outreach, noting both the patients it serves and their parents are “digital natives” and the health system needs to connect with them on their own terms.

“If we’re not digital, we’re invisible in our industry,” he said. “So we’ve got to make sure when we engage with our patients and families, we have the right digital tools, the right predictive algorithms from an AI perspective to allow us to speak their language.”

In response to an audience question about the impact of private equity on health care, Peri said these firms are often seeking to address commercial markets with an unmet need for urgent care. He said these providers typically have a narrow focus and execute it well, but then “expect partners to do the rest.”

Private equity-backed health firms have been a source of controversy in the state. Ascension Wisconsin last year first announced and then reversed plans to outsource staffing of some doctors to Tennessee-based TeamHealth, after some of its nurses, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and others raised concerns about the move.

Amid this trend, Peri yesterday said Children’s Wisconsin aims to “embrace with collaboration and partnership” the private equity-backed health firms coming into the market. The health system acts as a triage and referral partner for procedures and care they don’t do.

“They oftentimes are not staffed like we will, so we want to provide them education, information, whatever that might be, again because our focus is healthy kids, regardless of where they go,” he said.

An upcoming WisPolitics-WisBusiness-State Affairs event will explore the use of AI in addressing health care workforce shortages. The panel discussion, held with event partner the Wisconsin Technology Council, is happening May 5th at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

— The UW School of Medicine and Public Health has been ranked in the top tier of medical schools for the first time by U.S. News & World Report, joined by just 15 other schools in the country.

UW-Madison is touting the Tier 1 ranking for primary care, which is based in part on the share of the school’s 2017 to 2019 graduates who were practicing in certain primary care specialties last year. Those included family medicine, general internal medicine, general pediatrics, geriatrics, general practice or internal medicine-pediatrics.

The rankings also took into account program selectivity and the ratio of faculty to students, which is 2.3:1. The program acceptance rate is 4%.

Dr. Nita Ahuja, dean of the UW SMPH and vice chancellor for medical affairs at the university, says being included among the very best medical schools for primary care shows “our commitment to addressing critical physician workforce shortages.”

She notes about half of Wisconsin’s counties include federally designated primary care shortage areas.

“We must close that gap to meet our vision of healthy people and healthy communities,” she said in a statement on the ranking.

Meanwhile, the program also remained in Tier 2 for its research ranking, reserved for medical schools in the top 50th to 84th percentile for research performance.

“The ability to seek insights from complex, large-scale biomedical data — skills taught in our highly-ranked biostatistics program — is essential for discovering solutions to the world’s greatest health challenges,” Ahuja said in the university’s release.

See the full rankings and release.

For more of the most relevant health care news, reports on groundbreaking research in Wisconsin, links to top stories and more, sign up today for the free daily Health Care Report from WisPolitics and WisBusiness.com.

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— Xcel Energy and American Transmission Company have filed a federal complaint asking to be exempted from bidding rules for large transmission projects.

The two Wisconsin utilities are among a corporate coalition arguing that a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rule requiring regional grid operators to solicit bids is significantly delaying grid projects.

The coalition is asking FERC to suspend bidding on regional grid projects under the Midwestern and Southwestern regional transmission organizations or bypass that bidding for projects serving new generation or loads and assign it to “the appropriate transmission owning utility.”

ATC is jointly owned by several Wisconsin power companies and constructs power lines that serve them, while Xcel builds and owns its own transmission lines.

ATC said in a statement the coalition’s goal was to address unnecessary delays in building critical transmission infrastructure.

“This filing does not eliminate competition or oversight — projects would still be planned and approved through established regional, federal, and state processes, with full cost review,” the statement reads. “The goal is simply to avoid delays that have been shown to add months of cost and risk at a time of rapidly growing electricity demand.”

WisPolitics has reached out to Xcel for comment.

“This Complaint is about whether our country will seize, or squander, a generational chance to own the next century while also fulfilling the most fundamental obligation of utilities—to ensure all customers receive timely and affordable electric service,” the filing reads.

The 88-page filing cites new generation demand created by new hyperscale data centers and manufacturing that President Donald Trump pledged to bring back to the U.S.

It claims competitive bidding has delayed “critical” transmission projects under the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and the Southwest Power Pool by 16-20 months, cost billions in lost economic opportunity from delayed large load connections, and failed to generate cost savings for ratepayers.

The filing cites among its examples of delays created by competitive bidding MISO’s initial decision to assign a long-range transmission project in Wisconsin to an outside developer instead of ATC.

That project was reassigned to ATC last month and folded into the utility’s $1.3 billion buildout of transmission infrastructure surrounding Vantage’s Port Washington data center.

An industry group says the utility coalition is looking for federal regulators to hand them a monopoly at the expense of U.S. ratepayers.

“Suspending competition for five years in MISO and SPP would expose consumers in these regions to unchecked cost escalation for years, guaranteeing higher utility bills,” Paul Cicio, chair of the Electricity Transmission Competition Coalition, said in a statement.

The ETCC says competitive bidding has saved money for grid projects in the MISO and SPP regions and that removing that process would take away utilities’ incentives to reduce costs.

Wisconsin lawmakers last year introduced legislation meant to give state utilities the first crack at building new high-voltage transmission lines, known as “right of first refusal,” or ROFR, but the bill did not advance.

Todd Stuart of the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group called the federal complaint a “sore loser version of ROFR.”

“It is another effort by the utilities to defeat competition,” Stuart wrote in an email. “When they lose in state legislatures and then lose out on competitive bids, then I guess they go back (to) FERC. It would probably be better to spend time and resources working on a competitive bid than lobby with more excuses to eliminate competitive bidding.”

— Port Milwaukee is celebrating the start of international shipping this year, as the first vessel of the season recently delivered specialty steel products to the port.

Port officials recently announced a ship called the Federal Nagara arrived after navigating the St. Lawrence Seaway, bringing cargo from Spain and Belgium. It then departed for Thunder Bay, Ontario, after port staff presented Captain Laiquer Rahman with a commemorative plaque.

The port’s international shipping season aligns with the opening of the seaway, which occurred March 22, according to the announcement. The port last year had 60 international vessels pass through, carrying more than 570,000 metric tons of cargo.

“Each shipment handled through Milwaukee strengthens our role in the supply chain and supports regional industries, reinforcing our connection to markets around the world,” Port Director Benji Timm said in a statement.

See the release.

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from the latest WisBusiness column by manufacturing expert Buckley Brinkman.

— Wisconsin sits in a unique place with AI. Our large and diversified manufacturing industry provides fertile ground for implementing this technology and achieving immediate returns.

Our practical approaches to most problems set the foundation for effective implementations. Most importantly, various regions of the state are developing their own unique AI specializations.

Together, these three elements could make Wisconsin the leader in AI implementation and diffusion – but we need to approach this Wisconsinbly.

Read the full column.

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