In her heart, Kim Cronsell, MD, is a pediatrician. She always will be.
During her residency at Children’s Wisconsin, Dr. Cronsell received the Magis Award for outstanding care and the Eddy Award for work ethic, attitude and commitment to the pediatric residency program. She also has served as an assistant professor of Pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, helping to train tomorrow’s physicians. As a pediatrician at Children’s Wisconsin, she has received several awards for her dedication to the organization’s mission.
In addition to being a pediatrician, she’s also the medical director for the Digital Health and Experience team. And, if that weren’t enough, she’s associate chief medical officer at Children’s Wisconsin.
Even though Dr. Cronsell’s role and responsibility has changed much in her 12 years at Children’s Wisconsin, she continues to use her patient care experience and expertise to help transform how we care for our patients.
Dr. Cronsell has led the Digital Health and Experience team since it was created in 2018. In that role, she leads the digital health transformation at Children’s Wisconsin to extend and strengthen relationships with families. She works alongside application development managers, physicians and other care teams to train, research and implement Children’s Wisconsin’s digital health strategy.
Over the last four years, she has been instrumental in the creation and launch of several important initiatives, including:
- Online scheduling for all of the more than 20 Children’s Wisconsin primary care locations and more than 100 primary care pediatricians
- Electronic check-in for appointments
- Piloting the use of mobile phones as an examination tool to allow for remote appointments
- Launching video visits and helping train more than 700 providers and 70 pediatric subspecialties, including hospitalists, primary care and mental and behavioral health providers to utilize the new medium
- Forming a formal collaboration agreement with Avia Health in Chicago
In the last four years, under Dr. Cronsell’s leadership, Children’s Wisconsin has dramatically increased digital engagement with families. More than 160,000 video visit appointments have been conducted, 800,000 text messages have been exchanged and 150,000 appointments have been booked online.
One of the digital health tools Dr. Cronsell helped launch involves our patients who rely on tracheostomies and ventilators (trach/vents) to help them breathe. The COVID-19 pandemic caused disruptions in care for so many. But our patients with trach/vents actually saw their care improve. By combining remote monitoring with virtual visits, the Children’s Wisconsin Trach/Vent Team were able to see patients more often than before the pandemic, which allowed them to assess patients on camera, review their data and make vent adjustments in real time. As a result, these patients were able to decrease ventilator settings and even have their trachs removed far faster than before. In 2019, 17 kids had their trachs removed at Children’s Wisconsin. In 2020, relying on virtual visits, that number climbed to 28. Dr. Cronsell has given our care teams new tools and the necessary confidence to change how they deliver care for our patients.
Congratulations to Dr. Cronsell for being named a “Person to Know in Health Care” by the Milwaukee Business Journal. Read profiles of all the winners on the Milwaukee Business Journal website.
