Andrew Bullard: Allina Health (MHA '26)

Allina Commons – my home office for the summer

I have the opportunity to join Allina Health in Minneapolis, Minnesota for the summer. Allina Health employes 30,000 people, is the fifth biggest employer in the state and had 2024 revenue of 5.8 billion dollars. Allina is in the middle of moving from contracted to employed providers. This places Allina in a unique position of both being a large organization while also leaving many areas that operate independently. At Abbott Northwestern, the system’s flagship hospital, a new inpatient building is under construction. The Richard M. Schulze Surgical and Critical Care Center is the largest project in Allina’s history. Earlier this summer, the interns were able to take a tour of what an inpatient room in the new building will look like. These rooms will feature a lot of new technology, like cameras able to determine pulse, oxygen saturation and blood pressure without physically interacting with patients. Other opportunities during the summer have included a tour of Abbott Northwestern’s ED, helipad, morgue,  and Allina’s data center. We also shadowed clinic managers in both primary care and pulmonology / sleep medicine. One of the shadowing experiences I enjoyed most was shadowing a hospice unit coordinator at Abbott Northwestern. 

Drawing of Abbott Northwestern's new inpatient building

I joined the Care Integration team for the summer. Care Integration focuses on developing and improving provider relationship development across Allina Health, analyzing referral integration to identify performance and opportunities and improving and managing referral process workflow. My preceptor, Libby Storrick Peil, is the Care Integration Director. Working with Libby over the 12 weeks of the internship has provided me with the opportunity to see work ranging in scale from helping develop a tool for in-clinic schedulers to helping create an advisory committee for all Primary Care to providing system-wide recommendations in new provider onboarding and the hospital to hospice discharge process. My executive sponsor, Bill Evans, is Senior VP and Chief Medical Group Operations Officer. He provides an excellent strategic perspective on the future of healthcare. 

JA Sedum residential hospice

My main project for the summer focuses on improving network integrity in the hospital to hospice discharge process. The work of hospital discharge and hospice admission begins well before these events occur. The patient population is, by the definition of hospice, terminally ill and medically fragile. There is a narrow window to get these patients out of the hospital. Three teams, the inpatient care team, Care Management and Hospice, work together to ensure patients going on hospice care leave in a safe and timely manner. My other project on new provider promotion seeks to address Allina Health’s shift from contracted to employed providers and ensure as much care remains in-system as possible. 

Outside the internship, I have gotten the chance to explore St Paul and Minneapolis. I’m originally from St Paul but haven’t lived there since 2011. My wife and I moved into an apartment in downtown Minneapolis, while certainly not fun to move for a second time, living in a downtown high rise is a very interesting and different experience. We’ve gotten the opportunity to try a lot of different restaurants and plan to go to a Minnesota Twins game and Wild Night at the Minnesota Zoo later in August.

My wife, Corbin, and I on the roof of our new apartment building