Case Study: Winona Health achieves 56% lower total cost of care and paperless, data-driven care with Cerner

Winona Health’s population health work helps it achieve HIMSS Ambulatory honors

Winona Health is a nonprofit, 99‑bed community health system in Winona, MN, with one hospital and 13 outpatient clinics serving more than 114,000 outpatient visits a year. Like many small hospitals, it faced tight IT budgets and pressure to improve quality, reduce readmissions and lower costs while engaging patients across outpatient and inpatient settings.

To address this, Winona partnered with Cerner through long‑term ITWorks and RevWorks agreements to deploy an integrated EMR with CPOE and evidence‑based order sets, a sepsis‑detection algorithm, patient portal MyWinonaHealth, voice recognition documentation and unified billing. Outcomes include HIMSS Stage 7 ambulatory recognition (Stage 6 inpatient), up to 95% fewer readmissions/preventable ED visits, a 56% reduction in total cost of care (>$250K saved), portal adoption by >6,900 patients, elimination of paper processes, an 11‑FTE transcription reduction (≈$450K) and $2.5M above‑target self‑pay collections.

Winona Health

Daniel Parker

MD, Chief of the medical staff