Success Stories by State: Minnesota

• Gundersen Lutheran Health System: Performance Improvement Through Partnership
  August 2009
  Gundersen Lutheran Health System is a physician-led, not-for-profit integrated delivery system serving more than 550,000 people in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota.
• Diabetes Lay Educator Program: Enhancing Health Care for Hispanic Migrant Farmworkers
  May 2009
  The Diabetes Lay Educator Program was designed to reduce the high mortality rate and medical costs associated with diabetes in the area’s Hispanic population and to increase access to high quality, culturally competent health care services geared toward helping clients effectively manage diabetes.
• Healthy Nations Initiative
  October 2008
  The Healthy Nations Initiative was funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help Native Americans reduce the harm caused by substance abuse in their communities.
• Center for Rural Mental Health Studies at the University of Minnesota Medical School Duluth
  July 2008
  The Center for Rural Mental Health Studies is integrating mental health into primary care settings for underserved rural populations.
• Fairview-University of Minnesota Telemedicine Network
  July 2008
  A network to serve patients by telemedicine not just in hospitals, but in rural clinics, homes and long term care facilities.
• Ottertail’s Econodrug
  July 2008
  Ottertail’s Econodrug is a telepharmacy, which allows the store to provide prescription medication to customers without a pharmacist on the premises. In Ottertail this saves residents a 20-30 mile drive to the next pharmacy.
• Sowing the Seeds of Hope
  July 2008
  Sowing the Seeds of Hope is responding to the mental health needs of farm families. This is a collaborative effort of project leaders in seven predominantly rural states: Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.
• Tri-Valley Opportunity Council
  July 2008
  In 2002, Tri-Valley Opportunity Council assumed responsibility for coordinating a public transportation and volunteer driver system to serve a sparsely populated, very rural five-county area covering 6,500 miles in northwest Minnesota.
• Community Dental Care
  July 2008
  Community Dental Care provides dental care and preventive programs in a culturally and linguistically sensitive manner to low income and ethnic minority families to improve the overall health and quality of life for its patients.
• North Region Health Alliance
  July 2008
  North Region Health Alliance improved connectivity among the 24 health care providers by implementing a telecommunication infrastructure.
• Northeast Minnesota Area Health Education Center Iron Range Health Occupations Today
  July 2008
  The Northeast Minnesota Area Health Education Center Iron Range Health Occupations Today (H.O.T.) program provides health career pathways for students by establishing education partnerships to support and increase student skills as they discover health care career opportunities.
• Sanford Dental Clinic Canby
  July 2008
  The departing dentist was unable to sell his private practice and the community was going to be without local service so a dental clinic became part of the Sanford Canby Medical Center to provide local dental services.
• SISU Medical Systems
  July 2008
  SISU Medical Systems provides information technology to provider based health care organizations. As a consortium of 16 Minnesota hospitals, SISU enables its members to collaborate on various technology-related projects, while benefitting from the cost-savings of group purchasing and licensing power.
• St. Joseph’s Community Dental Clinic
  July 2008
  The St. Joseph’s Community Dental Clinic serves patients receiving Medical Assistance or Minnesota Care. The hospital-based clinic emphasizes comprehensive services.
• Trauma Nursing Core Course
  July 2008
  Greater Northwest Emergency Medical Services improved the quality of regional trauma care through an education outreach plan for rural nursing staff.
• Saint Elizabeth’s Medical Center Dementia Project
  July 2008
  Enhancing quality of care, life and services for seniors with dementia and their care providers.
• Migrant Health Service, Inc. $10 Self-Pay Drug Plan
  January 2008
  Migrant Health Service, Inc. (MHSI) was awarded the 2007 Sister Cecilia B. Abhold Award for Innovation in Health Outreach in the Midwestern stream. The award recognizes MHSI’s unique $10 Self-Pay Drug Plan that increases access to affordable medications in rural areas of North Dakota and Minnesota.
• Migrant Health Service, Inc. and Fargo-Moorhead YMCA Program
  January 2008
  Migrant Health Service, Inc. (MHSI) was recognized for its partnership with the Fargo-Moorhead YMCA that has provided facility memberships to more than 15 local farmworker families at no cost.
• EMS Co-op Helps Rural Providers
  September 2007
  Using the power of group purchasing within a cooperative structure, the North Central EMS Cooperative (NCEMSC) is an Emergency Medical Services (EMS) cooperative developed to serve Minnesota and surrounding states.
• Prescription for Prevention
  June 2007
  Three Minnesota organizations worked together to help with emergency prescriptions and, together, developed a program to provide clients with assistance for co-payments or one-month prescriptions.
• Affordable Workforce Housing in Blackduck, Minnesota
  June 2007
  An urgent need for affordable workforce housing in Blackduck, Minnesota was solved by an ambitious four-year project to build a 21-unit subdivision by 2005.
• Wadena's Telemedicine Program
  January 2007
  Tri-County Hospital (TCH) has been providing medical specialist outreach via telemedicine since 1994. This 25-bed Critical Access Hospital in Wadena, Minnesota has one of the most active telemedicine programs in the country and is the headquarters for the new Minnesota Telehealth Network. This network will extend telemedicine services to 38 Minnesota counties and eight North Dakota counties.
• Mahnomen County Mental Health Consortium
  January 2007
  The Mahnomen County Mental Health Consortium will focus on at-risk children and adolescents and their families, while expanding access of the general population to short-term outpatient services to ensure earlier intervention for individuals and families.
• Rice Regional Dental Clinic
  January 2007
  The goal of the Rice Regional Dental Clinic is to increase access to dental care for uninsured and underserved residents in the 12-county service area of west central and southwest Minnesota.
• Womens Health Project
  January 2007
  The overall goal of the program is to foster increased capacity and resources to assure rural health delivery of quality programming for women's health, including family planning and risk reduction services in three counties in north central Minnesota.