About Abbott Northwestern Hospital

Abbott Northwestern is the 700-bed (all private rooms), flagship, quaternary care center of the Minneapolis-based Allina Health system. Allina Health is an integrated health care system comprised of physicians, 11 hospitals, and over 100 clinics serving communities throughout Minnesota, western Wisconsin, and eastern North and South Dakota.

Abbott Northwestern, has been ranked the #1 hospital in the Twin Cities by US News and World Reports every year since 2012, a Top 25 teaching hospital in the nation, and a Top 100 overall hospital in the nation. It provides care for the largest number of adult patients in the Twin Cities metro area and has 700 active physicians on its staff. The entire medical complex is also the largest in the Twin Cities, occupying 6 city blocks near downtown Minneapolis. It includes the Sister Kenny Institute for physical rehabilitation and the adjacent Mother-Baby Center, and Children's Hospitals and Clinics - Minneapolis facility.

Abbott Northwestern attracts the Twin Cities best nurses and is the only Twin Cities hospital with the American Nurses Credentialing Center's (ANCC) Magnet Recognition.

A complete computerized patient record (Epic Systems) that integrates inpatient and outpatient records throughout the hospitals and clinics in the Allina system and its regional affiliates began in 2004. Allina received the 2007 national award for the best care system implementation of an electronic patient record. Medical records are also shared across the Twin Cities hospitals through the Epic system.

ANW Hospital ANW Hospital 2

Our Investment in the Future of the Hospital and Neighborhood

Allina Health is planning a multi-year infrastructure project at the Abbott Northwestern Hospital campus. This project will help us transform our patient facilities and prepare us to provide care for the next 50 years—in a neighborhood we’ve called home for more than 140 years. As a resident at Abbott over the next several years, you will benefit from these state-of-the-art additions to campus.

Allina Health and Abbott Northwestern Hospital have been deeply rooted in the South Minneapolis community for over 138 years.These improvements to the hospital include a continued unwaivering dedication to our neighbors. The residents, resident clinic, and residency program are central to Abbott's and Allina Health's mission to our amazing neighborhood.

ANW Hospital ANW Hospital 2

 

The Academic Environment

Abbott Northwestern is one of the most academic environments you will find in the United States without "University" in its name. As a major affiliate of the University of Minnesota Medical School, Abbott Northwestern participates in resident, student, and fellow education in Internal Medicine and at least 10 other medical specialties. Our Internal Medicine residents are involved in the care of approximately 125 of the inpatients on campus at any one time and we are the sole residency program on campus. Abbott Northwestern has a combined General Cardiology Fellowship with Hennepin County Medical Center as well as Interventional Cardiology, Advanced Heart Failure, Cardiac Imaging, and Valve & Structural Heart sub-fellowships. Abbott Northwestern Hospital and the Minneapolis Heart Institute have a Vascular Surgery fellowship as well.

Our Patients

Our inpatients represent a unique mix of cultures and socioeconomics and have a range of health care problems that is broader than would be found in most other teaching hospitals. Approximately one-third of our patients come from outside the Twin Cities metro area. Many of these patients are referrals from other hospitals that need quaternary level care. Another large and important patient group comes from the hospital's multicultural, lower socioeconomic, inner-city neighborhood that the hospital has been an integral part of since its begginings in 1882. The Twin Cities and our immediate neighborhood has a very large immigrant patient population including the Nation's largest Somali population. Patients may enter our system through our busy emergency department or through our on-campus resident outpatient clinic. Inpatients on the residents' service include the hospital's most interesting and complex patients, although common primary care medical problems are also well represented. Our residents also help care for surgical, obstetrical, psychiatric and rehabilitation patients with internal medicine complications. This important additional experience adds to our residents' breadth of experience.

Community Involvement - "Caring for our neighborhood"

Allina Health, Abbott Northwestern Hospital, and the IM residency program at Abbott Northwestern are embedded in one of Minnesota's most diverse communities: the Phillips neighborhood. The hospital and Allina Health headquarters are embedded in the East Lake culutural district of Minneapolis. The mission of our hospital and on-campus resident continuity clinic is to serve the surrounding neighborhood with the highest quality care and improve the health of the community around us. This involves an integrated approach to addressing social determinants of health, providing access to leading health/medical technology, providing the necessary assistance programs to facilitate utilization of the care available, and a robust community involvement program that addresses health prevention, safety, wellness, and health disparity gaps within our community.

On Wednesdays, two residents and a Chief Resident staff the Southside Community Clinic which provides significant outreach to the underserved individuals in its south Minneapolis neighborhood. Southside is a federally qualified health center (FQHC) that provides patient focused, high quality, culturally competent care with services including medical, dental, vision, behavioral health, and enabling services such as care coordination to individuals and families who are low-income, uninsured or under-insured, populations of color, immigrants and refugees. The clinic is staffed primarily by famiy medicine practitioners, but on Wednesdays our residents and staff bring consultative internal medicine services for the most complex patients along with the invaluable resource of point-of-care ultrasound.

Our Chief Residents run our neighborhood healthcare mentorship and scholarship program with Minneapolis South High School. This is a series of 6 mentorship sessions each year including hands-on sessions with ultrasound, simulation, blood typing, and interactive career sessions giving high school students an overview of the health care field. Residents and faculty run these events and provides a fun teaching experience and connection to our neighborhood youth. The program is also an important long-game component of our community work helping to increase underrepresented students in medicine. You can view a video from the mentorship program below.

 

We completed construction a new state-of-the-art Community & Education Center on campus during the 2023 academic year. This center houses a new 6-room simulation center, community event and meeting spaces, and large educational auditoriums for various activities. The center is an effort to not only update the original simulation facilities started by our residency program in 2009, but also to provide our neighborhood with community gathering and educational spaces that currently do not exist. This video gives a brief history of innovation at Abbott Northwestern, the neighborhood we serve, and also highlights the new center.

Residents and faculty are involved with many other community activities as both the hospital, resident continuity clinic, and Allina Health headquarters sit on our campus in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis.