Large-Scale Genetic Testing Coming to Wisconsin Hospitals Including Marshfield

Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 -- 9:00 AM

(Anna Marie Yanny, Wisconsin Public Radio) Families across Wisconsin will soon have better access to a large-scale form of genetic testing to help diagnose infants with rare conditions as a program run by the state’s medical colleges enters hospitals outside of Madison and Milwaukee. 

According to Anna Marie Yanny with the Wisconsin Public Radio, starting this month, the program will help implement rapid genomic testing in six neonatal intensive care units, or NICUs, including in La Crosse, the Fox Valley, Green Bay and Marshfield.

This type of test is already available in large hospitals such as American Family Children’s Hospital in Madison and Children’s Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

“Regardless of … where a baby is born, we want them to be able to have access to this genomic testing,” said genetic counselor April Hall, who’s an assistant professor of pediatrics at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.

Almost 2,000 babies in Wisconsin are born each year with a birth defect, which can stem from underlying genetics. A study at Boston Children’s Hospital found about one-third of babies with genetic disorders in its advanced NICU died undiagnosed.

“The first step to be able to treat rare disorders is to make that identification of them,” said clinical geneticist Jessica Scott Schwoerer at Children’s Wisconsin and the Medical College of Wisconsin. “Find them, so therefore we can treat them.”

Getting that diagnosis can help physicians target treatments and reduce the babies’ hospital stays, Hall added. The goal of the program, called the Baby Badger Network, is to expand access to rapid genomic testing beyond the state’s largest hospitals.

“The goal of the Baby Badger Network is to set up the infrastructure so there is that capacity to offer this testing to any infant in any NICU in the state that would benefit,” Scott Schwoerer  said.

About two years ago, Hall and Scott Schwoerer helped start the network in two Green Bay hospitals, with funding from a $50,000 grant from the Advancing A Healthier Wisconsin Endowment.

The network offered training and standardized workflows to clinicians there. Hall and Scott Schwoerer hope expanded access to testing will make a big difference for the few babies across the state who need it.

“Some of these smaller hospitals don’t have as many babies who would qualify for genetic testing,” Hall said. “But we’re hopeful that at least at each site, we would have 10 babies that we’re able to test, and that just gets those babies a quicker diagnosis.”

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