Ascension Wisconsin Developing Plans to Staff Some Intensive Care Units With Doctors from TeamHealth

Saturday, August 16th, 2025 -- 9:00 AM

(Anya Van Wagtendonk, Wisconsin Public Radio) A nonprofit chain of Wisconsin hospitals will replace some of its doctors with services from a national physician staffing agency, WPR has confirmed.

According to Anya Van Wagtendonk with the Wisconsin Public Radio, as first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Ascension Wisconsin is developing plans to staff some of its intensive care units with doctors from TeamHealth, a private equity-backed company based in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Those doctors will provide care both in person and via telehealth, and the full coverage plan is still being developed, a spokesperson for Ascension Wisconsin told WPR.

“Ascension Wisconsin is adapting critical care services across our health system to better align staffing and resources to match the acuity level of the patients our hospitals treat,” said the spokesperson in a written statement.

“This includes transitioning from multiple critical care contractors and models to a single physician group of intensivists employed by TeamHealth.” But nurses at one Ascension hospital expressed concerns about how the changes will affect the care that they can provide.

“At what cost are we continuing to put our patients, my mom, your mom, anybody’s mom or dad, brother, sister, family member, at risk?” said Connie Smith, president of the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Care Professionals, a union that represents much of the health care staff at Ascension St. Francis Hospital, on the south side of Milwaukee.

And a St. Francis nurse, April Menke, said she worried that incorporating more telehealth would slow down response times. “Time is muscle. Time is your brain,” she said. “The faster you can get a patient to the services that they need, the faster you are able to restore the blood flow to that area, the better outcomes you would have.”

According to the Ascension spokesperson, the hospital network is changing its staffing model to “enhance care coordination.” The move is part of an increasing trend of outsourcing clinical staff to private equity-backed firms.

While that model has been common for other health care staff for years, the turn to alternate models for staffing doctors reflects a post-pandemic crisis in health care, said Zoey Kernodle, who directs the Center for the Business of Health at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

There’s been a falloff in health care providers, she said, who became burnt out during the COVID-19 emergency, coupled with hospitals searching for ways to cut costs.

“The trend is certainly moving in a direction where hospitals are looking for cost savings and outsourcing clinical staff is certainly the easiest way to lighten expenses,” Kernodle said.

Those costs can accrue elsewhere when private equity is involved, she added, including higher costs billed to patients or insurers, and mixed health care results.

And with recent cuts to Medicaid, a program many hospitals that serve low-income patients rely on, “this reliance on private equity and outsourcing is only going to increase,” she said. “It’s neither all bad, (and) it’s certainly not all good,” she said. “It’s always more complex than it seems in health care because there are usually not great other options in these circumstances.”

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