The Pediatric Rheumatology service of the Medical College of Wisconsin and Children’s Wisconsin provides multidisciplinary, longitudinal, comprehensive care to children with rheumatic diseases.   This includes continual care in our ambulatory clinics as well as in-patient care to children with rheumatic diseases when necessary. Our six faculty physicians, two fellows, and one nurse practitioner provide ambulatory care at three sites:  The Children’s Clinics Building on the main campus adjacent to Children’s Wisconsin in Milwaukee, and the ambulatory clinics of Children’s Wisconsin-Fox Valley in Neenah, Wisconsin and Kenosha Clinic-Children’s Wisconsin in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Our service also provides in-patient and ambulatory consultation for children with a wide variety of musculoskeletal, inflammatory, and autoimmune conditions. We care for and evaluate children and young adults who range in age from newborns to college students. In addition to providing direct clinical care, our service participates in clinical trials of therapeutic agents, clinical registry studies to monitor long term outcomes, multicenter quality improvement activities, and other clinical studies to improve the care we provide to children with rheumatic diseases. We work closely with primary care providers, particularly for those children and families who live a distance away, to coordinate the needs of our patients and to help minimize, as much as possible, the burden on families of caring for a child with a chronic rheumatic disease. We strive to educate our patients and families regarding their illness, recognizing that those who understand their condition and the rationale for treatment are more likely to experience optimal outcomes.

Our service is one of many within the Medical College of Wisconsin and Children’s Wisconsin, and we can engage the many resources of these organizations to care for our patients. We frequently enlist the help of our colleagues in other subspecialties to provide the best care for our patients, and there is a high level of collaboration and communication among the subspecialists that we work with. Similarly, we are a multidisciplinary service, and our nurses, social worker, and administrative staff also are closely involved in the care of the children we serve, working to ensure that we provide comprehensive care to our patients and their families.