Caitlin Whyte (Host): Welcome to in Their Words, a podcast brought to you by the UPMC Pinnacle Foundation and UPMC in Central PA. In every episode, we highlight the voices of those improving lives across our communities. Today, we sit down with Maureen Zimmerman, Director of Corporate Wellness and the leader of the CARES Program, short for Corporate Ambassador Resource and Employer Solutions.

Through CARES, UPMC brings health screenings, CPR, training, education, and more directly into the workplace. Whether you're behind a desk or behind a forklift, Maureen and her team are making sure better health is within reach.

Maureen Zimmerman: My name is Maureen Zimmerman. I'm the Director of Corporate Wellness, which goes under the name of CARES, which is an acronym for Corporate Ambassador Resource and Employer Solutions. It's corporate, but we also dip a little bit into community wellness as well. I've been in the role for four years. I've been with UPMC for 10 years. And the reason why I am in the role and doing what I do at UPMC is I'm not clinical in nature, so I don't have a nursing degree or that. I've got about maybe 20 years in pharmaceuticals. So really, I've always been around trying to help people be healthier versions of themselves.

The problem that I had in the pharmaceutical sector was that most people stepped over that first step, which is lifestyle modifications and went right to medical, you know, treatments or pharmaceuticals or whatever. So, I feel better about this, taking people back about basic steps that they can do to help themselves and then know that UPMC is there to help them if they need additional things like weight management, counseling or whatever. Everybody's got their little niche of what they know best. And I feel as though our team knows wellness best. And if we can plant some seeds with people who don't know wellness as well as we do, we're going to help them along the journey.

Stephanie: What does CARES actually look like in action? With a small but mighty team, Maureen explains how they work with over 150 businesses, adapting services to meet the needs of each. From biometric screenings and flu clinics, to blood pressure checks and health fairs, no two engagements are ever the same.

Maureen Zimmerman: So, we've got a team that's comprised of two account managers, that's Lori and Susan. We've got a clinical coordinator who oversees about 15 to 18 PRN nurses, nurse educators, some other, you know, supplemental staff in there. We've got a data analyst who works with our customer relations management tool. And then, it's almost like an island of misfit toys, if you will. So, a little bit of everybody comes together and makes this big, beautiful gift. We'll say that we've probably got like maybe 150 to 200 established clients. And when I say they're established, every one of their programs is different. For some, we might do an annual health fair. For somebody else, maybe we do monthly blood pressure checks. Everyone is different and we try to be like Gumby to anyone that's interested in having us come on site to help them.

So, Susan and Lori, they go to a ton of networking events. They work with brokers who've got these established relationships with these clients that we want to partner up with, and they kind of parlay that relationship into learning about whether or not these companies want to do more than they're doing now. So, one thing about CARES is we do what we do for a fee, but it is a nominal fee. These companies also have other tools that they can use that we'll work closely with such as their insurance carrier, their broker, anything like that where we're just trying to help them get the most of it. Our services are nominally priced. What we're really looking to do is to cover our staffing fees, cover our supplies, and so forth. It is not a big revenue generator for UPMC. But we are in the marketing team kind of because we are the gateway to the health system.

So, as I said before, our account managers kind of go out. They establish relationships, uncover needs for businesses that help their employees. And our services range from educational presentations that could be 20 minutes long, 45 minutes long. They cover a broad spectrum from overall health to nutrition, to mental health, stress management, so forth. So, there that which we can do either virtually or on site. We've got some blood work screenings that are my favorite. We did them at Southgate this morning. But biometric screenings, which we do not only for our UPMC employees, but we do them for our corporate partners as well when they ask, it's a finger stick and it gives you the most amount of information for your health that you can within a 20-minute window. So, they come in, they get weighed, their height, so we can calculate their BMI. A simple finger stick with a couple drops of blood, we can tell them it depends on the metrics that they contract with us for. But the best is total cholesterol, LDLs, HDLs, triglycerides, glucose, and they throw out all these terminologies. And getting back to that, what I said before about we know wellness and we know the metrics. I always use myself as an example when I first had blood work drawn. And venipuncture is another way that these results can be measured. The problem is that's drawing blood from your vein. Then, what you do is you send that off to the lab, and it really takes another day or so before you get the results back. And you're no longer sitting side by side with that nurse educator who can tell you, "This is what HDL stands for. This is a way to remember whether it's good or bad for you. This is the range that you want to be in." So, that's the beauty of our nurse educators, and they're so good at what they do, but they take that 20 minutes to educate the participant on what their values are.

So, biometrics are another one that I mentioned before. We have CPR training that we can do for businesses that are interested in having their teams trained on the American Heart Association Program. We do flu vaccinations in the fall. We're inundated with those. We work closely with our outpatient pharmacy team who likes to get out and do these little field trips also, and they can do vaccination clinics, such as shingles, pneumonia, they even do a prophylactic rabies vaccination clinic for friends over at the Pennsylvania Games Commission. So when I talk about how, we really just try to listen to what they need and then create something or respond to it. So every year, the Pennsylvania Game Commission has a new class of cadets come in to the Harrisburg Elmerton Avenue location. We send one of our training nurses out to draw the blood that we then send to the Harrisburg lab to find out if you've been vaccinated before. We titer them to see if it's still in therapeutic range. And for those that have never had a vaccine, and again, this is a prophylactic vaccine as opposed to being bitten by a bear and then needing to have the vaccination. We go on site with our pharmacist and that's a two-step vaccination process. But these give you examples of some of the things that we do for these people. And we try to take as much of the cumbersome burden on as we can.

So Lori and Susan, they identify what the needs are. They put together a document called a letter of agreement. The client signs for that. It shows when we're going to be there, how much we're going to charge, blah, blah, blah. They send that off, it comes back signed, and then we get busy on staffing it. We've identified how many people we need. We set that up. We've got that great team of 15 to 18 PRN nurses that are like, "I can work that event." The beauty of them is most of them are retired nurses, and they work when they want to work and if they want to spend a month with their grandkids, they do. But it always works out. And as I said, the team jokes with me. That's my adage, it's going to beyond the epitaph. But it always works out. And if it doesn't work out, then we'll pivot and we'll do something else to make it work out on a different day.

So then, we go on site, we set up. Actually, for some of our events such as the biometrics, when I say that we do as much as we can for the client, we have a scheduling and a pre-registration link. We'll create a promotional flyer. We'll send it off to them. They send it out to their employees. Their employees will register. We know who the participants are ahead of time. This is an example, as I said, just for the biometric screenings.

And then, once we come on site, we take care of registration, screening, send them on their way with their results in hand from that 20-minute interaction with us. We bill them afterwards. And the feedback that we get from these clients is they just love how professional our CARES team is coming on site. And the amount of information that they walk away with after a 20-minute engagement.

 The biometrics are the most comprehensive thing I think that we do. But we've got this range of educational tables that we can also provide for health fairs that are nutritional based or, you know, the dangers of alcohol, and so forth. We've got an amazing tobacco cessation team with Shannon Mason and Pam Miller, and they do just such great work on taking people wherever they are in the process, and they have to at least be one foot into "I'm interested." And then, they can work with them and get them on a plan where if they've decided they want to stop smoking or vaping or whatever, they get them closer and closer to their goal.

Caitlin Whyte (Host): But CARES isn't just about health metrics or attendance sheets. At a site visit to Stauffers, the CARES team uncovered critical, even life-threatening conditions. Two employees discovered they were walking medical emergencies and might not have known it otherwise. These are the moments that define why this work matters.

Maureen Zimmerman: I would like to think that we could do more, but it all comes down to some businesses just see it as a return on investment. What's the financial return on investment for us to do this? Because as I said, our fees are kind of nominal. But as you pointed out, the return on investment for Stauffers is the fact that these two employees are still with them, are under proper medical care, and whatever benefits are associated with their health, and as I mentioned before, like, these two may or may not have had a doctor. So if they didn't and they're not being treated for something or trying to get them in so that they can have proper care and treatment of something before it escalates to this catastrophic claim, whether they had a stroke and now they're off work and they're in rehab and all of these other things. And that's the cold side of it. How about the fact that some people view these employees as family? And so, knowing that this person isn't sitting at their desk or operating that machinery anymore, because maybe they didn't even make it.

So, I told Lori that I wanted to come up with an acronym for ROI that is not return on investment, but something that we can promote to businesses to say, "This is your ROI," but it's got to be linked to the intangibles as opposed to, "Well, if you do this $2,000 event, you're going to save $8,000 in medical claims because that kind of tracking is kind of difficult." The companies that do anything for it, we applaud it because even if you do an annual health fair or a quarterly virtual lunch and learn, you're trying. You're trying to help your employees. And my predecessor, she said it best when she said it needs to be marketed to the employees as something we're doing for you, not to you. Because if you have a hundred employees, you're going to have probably 15 of them that won't do anything you offer or you are going to have 15 of those employees out of those 100 employees will do anything you offer them. And that's great too. But what we're really trying to do is to go for that 70 in the middle. It's not that they're averse to improving their health or close-minded, they just really haven't been given the opportunity. And they don't know where to go and they don't know what they don't know.

So, those are the people that we're trying to help. And you're not going to have those two that you had from Stauffers. You are not going to have a full day of those. But if you can plant some seeds with people that are open-minded and possibly really shine a light on some facts that somebody didn't know and they need to address and get that process moving along, those are the kind of things that we're trying to get businesses to realize and it has to come from leadership down. Because we've done that before where we do these programs for onsite, leadership doesn't promote it very well and they don't even participate in it. So, it's no doubt that the employee is going to view this as, "Wait, what are you going to do with this information?" They start to see it as, you know, I bet they're going to find the people that have the high blood pressure. And that's not it at all. So, it has to be viewed as something that's being done for you. And if leadership participates in it and promotes it and is excited about it, then that will come across. And if they see them participate in it, then they'll be like, "Well, they're in it."

But when I think about our UPMC footprint and I think of how few businesses-- I mean, I think 150-200 clients is terrific. When you think about how many businesses there are in our footprint and you think only working with 150, 200, there is so much potential out there. That's why your video is so great because businesses see that and they think, "Well, that's amazing. We could do that." And at least ask the next question, which is how much would it cost for us to do this for you?" That's all we do.

So in this very competitive employment environment, doing everything that you can to retain, and this is showing value. It's like we value you being an employee of our company. And so, we're going to do this for you. I would never say that I want a CARES engagement to be instead of a physician's appointment. But if they can't get to the doctor because they're just tied up with their family and they make sure their kids get to the pediatrician and their husband gets to his, but they don't take care of themselves, let us do what we can to just help educate them.

And we've actually had so many people, that 20-minute, it stuck with them. It landed and they made lifestyle modifications. And the next year, they bring in their results and they can't wait. Hopefully, they asked if they could be paired up with the same person. And if they're there, we do. But they want to show them, "This is what you showed me and this is what I did in my life, and this is where I am now." We've got lots of success stories like that too.

Caitlin Whyte (Host): CARES is built on connection. But some of its biggest breakthroughs happen because of support behind the scenes. Maureen shares how the UPMC Pinnacle Foundation helped expand CPR training and subsidized services for organizations in need making community wellness not only possible, but sustainable.

Maureen Zimmerman: Well, let me just tell you about the most recent one that made us so much more marketable, and that was supporting the CPR training that we could never do before. LifeTeam was always out there. LifeTeam did an awesome job of it. And I have one member of my staff, her name's Peggy Manning, and she does CPR training for the system. But she's part of the CARES team too. And she would train us when we needed our CPR training, but we didn't have a team of instructors. And so, the foundation paid for the training of whatever nurses that we had on our staff that wanted to be trained to go out and to run these CPR education courses.

That was the first step, is just training our staff. Then, the next one was it allowed us to market it to paid clients, corporate businesses. Sometimes even a church can afford it. They've got it in their budget, and they'll come to us and we'll do it. But when they can't, we go back. Like, I've got another church over in Mechanicsburg that didn't budget for it. And when you have somebody that's trying to just train their staff to be ready for their congregation, God forbid, that they need that. You want to do whatever you can to help them. And so, Jess Ritchie has said that if you have situations like that and you need the the foundation to pay for the care staffing and the booklets and so forth, I just submit it to them. I haven't submitted like 50. But the ones that I've submitted, absolutely, go ahead. And that's what you need is, like, you just need there to be there for the community. And she is.

And that's from a financial point. What you did for us with the Stauffers employees is to take the CARES' good work, and then to put it into something that we can market so that others can see. That's been phenomenal. And if we can do something like that with the biometrics and people whose lives have been changed, but to just take them and to put faces to them and to put personal stories to them, I think, it's going to really just take CARES to the next level. It all gets back to everything we do. We customize. So if you've got something in place and you think that what we can do can augment that, I'll give you a good example of that.

Capital Blue Cross has an awesome program for diabetes care management. And if you remember earlier on the call, what I said was that everybody knows their wheelhouse, but they don't know everything outside their wheelhouse. So, the woman at Stauffers, she's probably awesome at her job, but she doesn't realize that the importance of going to a primary care provider, she doesn't understand what her glucose levels are, blood pressure, what it's supposed to be. So, what we do is we just take those people and we help them with the things that they're not the expert in. With Capital Blue Cross, if you're insured with them, and we do work with all insurances, not all insurances want to work with us, but we do work with all insurances and they've got this amazing program. So, all we want to do is to help promote what is already available to the employees that the employer is paying for, but is too busy to share all that they have. Like, if you think about open enrollment, you are overwhelmed with copay's going to be this, deductibles this, blah, blah, blah. And we've got this diabetes education program and we've got a cessation program. And it's just flooding the employee with too much information that is outside their wheelhouse. So, let us come on site, do what we do. We're not there just to promote their diabetes. But if we identify somebody through a biometric screening and they're covered by Capital Blue Cross, we'll say, "Did you know that you have access to this program that your employer is paying for? Did you know that your employer has this amazing employee assistance program?" It can help you with stress management. So, we don't have to be the provider of all solutions. We can help businesses better promote the solutions that they're already paying for once we kind of identify the need in that employee.

So, that's what I would say is like we are offering services, we are offering solutions, but we're also helping you better utilize the tools that you have access to, that you're paying somebody else for. Let us help you pass that information along to the employees. And then, we have this awesome health system that if you need additional help outside a PRN CARES nurse. We can get on onsite and talk about, you know, hernias and the importance of sleep and how can that can benefit your employee workforce. And it's like all we're doing is tapping into the experts, but let us know what your problems are. Let us try to listen to it, and then come up with solutions and get you into the system. Not for the purposes of UPMC, but for the purposes of your employees' better health.

And that's the difference between, my life when I was in the pharmaceutical sector pulling into the driveway at the end of the day and you're like, "Hmm. What good did I do today? I dropped off a lot of drugs in a lot of offices, and they're probably going to give them away." But this is different. And I would say that it just makes me feel proud to be like the person who represents, but doesn't do all that important work that's taking place. It's Susan and Lori. I'm working so hard to meet new businesses and to share that same passion that I have, but they share it on a boots-on-the-ground level, and it's the Shannons and the Pams that take this passion for helping people, not forcing them to stop smoking, but taking somebody who wants to stop and showing them how they can do it, and awesome nurses that just want to take people and answer their questions and help them. And it's very gratifying, not so much for me, but just to know that I get to represent them because they're the ones doing all the hard work. But it's very rewarding. And then, when we get emails that said so-and-so at Volvo gave us this great testimonial, it lands in your lap and you're like, "I need to tell somebody about this," because our team is doing such good work and they deserve the pat on the back.

Caitlin Whyte (Host): For Maureen, this work isn't about checking boxes. It's about helping people understand their bodies, their benefits, and their value as individuals. And for every story of a changed life, there's a team behind the scenes, educating, empowering, and doing the quiet work of saving lives.

Thanks for listening to in Their Words, a podcast from the UPMC Pinnacle Foundation and UPMC in Central PA. If you are enjoying our stories on In Their Words, please like, rate, review, and share with your friends. Until next time.