Willow Creek Women’s Clinic announces merger with OakLeaf Clinics

Rachel Kroeger

Staff

March 17, 2025

ALTOONA – An independent women’s clinic in the Chippewa Valley is merging with a regional physician-owned healthcare provider to ensure continued access to quality care for its patients.

Willow Creek Women’s Clinic – founded by Certified Family Nurse Practitioner Linda Poirier – has been providing “personalized primary care” since 2006.

However, after nearly two decades of serving the healthcare needs of women in the West Central region, Poirier said she was ready to retire but didn’t want to leave her roughly “5,000 patients” without care.

The solution, she said, was found in OakLeaf Clinics – which, according to oakleafmedicalnetwork.com, is “the largest clinic of independent physicians in (the) OakLeaf Medical Network.”

“We were always pretty involved (with) the OakLeaf provider group, in that if we had patients that we referred off, we often (sent them) to OakLeaf,” Poirier said. “So, I was very familiar with OakLeaf, and actually worked for 10 years at Eau Claire Women’s Care with Dr. Donna Schoenfelder, which was an OakLeaf clinic.”

Poirier said Schoenfelder served as Willow Creek’s collaborating physician for 16 years.

Because of her prior experience, when Poirier began looking for someone to take over her practice, she said it only made sense to merge with OakLeaf and hand operations over to Willow Creek’s most recent collaborating physician – who was mentored by Schoenfelder – Dr. Jordan Crow.

By entrusting her practice with Crow, Poirier said she believes he will carry on the legacy of personalized care she has established at Willow Creek.

“His surgical skills are just incredible, which is important, but equally important for women is that we found somebody who also has really great bedside manner, who really cares about his patients,” she said. “Not that other physicians don’t care about their patients, but he really takes the time to get to know them and makes that extra effort to really establish a relationship with them.”

As an independent, physician-owned provider, Crow said OakLeaf gives physicians like himself the opportunity to provide better care and address needs in communities like the Chippewa Valley that have seen a recent decrease in healthcare options.

“Because we are physician-owned, it allows us to be nimble,” he said. “It allows us to make a decision today and make the change tomorrow.”

Years in the making

Crow said he started as Willow Creek’s collaborating physician after Schoenfelder “retired a handful of years ago.”

“Linda was looking for another collaborating physician, and I had a really great relationship with Donna and with Linda, so it was a natural fit for me to continue in that role,” he said. “That way the clinic could keep doing what it (was) doing.”

Poirier said when she started to consider retirement several years ago, she began discussing a potential merger with Crow.

“We started talking a few years ago,” she said. “I was thinking about maybe getting ready to retire (but was) not really sure. (It’s) a long process of making those decisions.”

During those years of contemplation, Poirier said it was important to her that whoever took over Willow Creek would maintain its “nursing model.”

“The providers at Willow Creek Women’s Clinic are all nurse practitioners,” she said. “So, we function under a nursing model. In that model, each patient visit is seen as an opportunity to assess all facets of the patient’s life.”

Assessing all facets of a patient’s life, Poirier said, entails longer and more comprehensive visits to discuss anything that may be concerning the patient.

“Each visit is looking at their physical problem – we do the assessment, the diagnosis and the treatment plan,” she said. “But it’s also an opportunity to look at what’s happening in their world. We look at what’s happening in their personal life, we’re looking at their mental health, we’re looking at socioeconomic concerns they have. So it’s really a holistic approach.”

A “medical-model” approach to care, Poirier said, is more mission-based – meaning the patient visits their provider and is only asked about and treated for the concern that brought them in.

“In a nursing model, we really take each visit as an opportunity to assess the entire person, not just at your annual exam – which is often the only time that the whole person gets evaluated,” she said. “We do that at each visit. So, each visit is really an opportunity for us to see what’s going on in the woman’s life and what happens, I think, is we end up forming really strong relationships and really strong trust.”

Poirier said maintaining those relationships and that trust among Willow Creek’s patients was top of mind when choosing the direction the clinic would go upon her retirement – which is why she took several years before the merger was made official and announced.

“I wanted the clinic to continue with the nursing model, and (find) that right partnership (where) I felt comfortable that (it) would continue,” she said.

Poirier said her partnership with Crow was the one she needed in order to confidently step away from her clinic.

“I feel like Dr. Crow totally understands the nursing model and the importance of maintaining that, and that’s unique,” she said. “So not only is he a skilled surgeon and will continue to provide that service for us and that consultation for us, but moving forward, he has 100% grasped the importance of continuing a nursing model clinic and having that option available for women in the Chippewa Valley.”

The other factor that Poirier said was a priority in planning her retirement was ensuring the future of her clinic beyond her time at the helm.

To achieve longevity, she said Willow Creek required additional support as “it has become more difficult, certainly in the last five years, to maintain complete independence” as a clinic.

“Having the support of an umbrella organization, financially, will make the clinic much more solid and will really give it the opportunity to move into the future,” she said. “It’s really hard to be completely independent. You just don’t get those benefits of being part of a larger organization.”

Poirier said her pre-existing relationship with Crow – an independent OakLeaf physician of seven years – and the desire to come under a larger health organization all pointed her in the direction of OakLeaf.

A unique care experience

Poirier said since Crow has been Willow Creek’s collaborating physician for four years, he understands and appreciates the unique approach her clinic has taken to women’s health care.

“I think there are a lot of people who over the last few years have come to find that their experience at Willow Creek is a unique and special one and I want to maintain that for them,” Crow said.

Following the closures of HSHS and Prevea hospitals and clinics across the Chippewa Valley, Crow said it became more clear to him the one-size-fits-all approach to primary care was not the best method for women’s health.

“No. 1, that’s not the way health care works, and No. 2, that’s especially not the way primary care and women’s health works,” he said. “It’s a much more personal and close relationship that you’re going to have with those types of providers.”

What was soon made even clearer for him, Crow said, was OakLeaf’s role in the future of Willow Creek.

“As the collaborating physician for the providers at Willow Creek, we’ve become very close,” he said. “So, it was a natural fit for me to say, ‘Hey, Willow Creek could remain 100% independent (but) with the landscape of health care changing, there are just so many benefits to also being a part of a larger organization, like OakLeaf.’”

Not only will the clinic continue to serve patients in the way it has under the OakLeaf umbrella, Crow said Willow Creek’s services are expected to expand because of the merger.

“We’ll have increased access to certain labs and imaging – like mammograms,” he said.

Poirier said Willow Creek’s providers will also reap the benefits of this merger as it provides job stability and the potential for increased reimbursement.

“The way that medicine functions is that you have contracts with every single individual insurance company,” she said. “So if you go in as a big group, you have more power to negotiate higher reimbursement rates. If you go in as a single provider, you don’t have that kind of oomph to be able to negotiate those higher rates.”

Another significant advantage of the merger, Poirier said, is that OakLeaf and Crow were able to buy and renovate a permanent clinic location for Willow Creek’s workforce and clientele.

“When we started the clinic in 2006, I was leasing, and then the new clinic that we just moved to three years ago, we were also leasing,” she said. “So, going with OakLeaf, we were actually able to buy a location – put down firm, solid roots, where it’s not going to change anymore.”

Crow said aside from the new services and new location – which will be located at 3040 Meadowlark Lane, Suite 2 in Altoona – he hopes Willow Creek’s patients see that their care will remain relatively unchanged, or if anything, improve.

“Yes, it’ll be a new building, but it’ll be mostly the same faces, the same providers,” he said. “And though Linda’s retiring, (my hope is) that they’re not going to feel that there’s been a huge change to the dynamic of the care. The feel will be the same, and experience will be very similar, but they just may have a few more (service) options.”

Though it is merging with a larger health care provider, both Poirier and Crow said Willow Creek will maintain its name, model and identity.

“OakLeaf was definitely the solution for us, because it allowed us to maintain that independence and not be swallowed up by a large organization, which then you have very little control over how, how the clinic is run and how patient visits are structured,” Poirier said. “This is going to allow us to continue to serve our patients in the way that we always have.”