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The minute that can change your life

What motivates a middle-aged man to schedule a medical checkup? How does a newly diagnosed breast cancer patient make a decision about her best course of treatment? Where will an elderly person with sudden numbness seek emergency care?

The decision to access medical services does not always come with the luxury of time. In many instances, people need to make choices on where they will seek care at a time when they are very vulnerable.

That’s where UPMC Minute can help. “Providing health information to the community is part of UPMC’s critical educational mission,” says Marian Dezelan, vice president, UPMC Marketing Communications. “UPMC Minute is a valuable resource that raises awareness of risk factors and symptoms, and prompts action so health problems can be prevented or detected in their earliest stages. The spots also serve to highlight UPMC’s unique services and excellent practitioners.” The physicians featured on UPMC Minute serve as spokespeople for UPMC and their medical colleagues, who represent the breadth and depth of UPMC’s clinical expertise.

People are paying attention. This unsolicited note came through the UPMC website:

“I would like to thank you for your TV spots ‘UPMC Minute.’ After experiencing some unsettling minutes one night, I happened to see a segment on women and heart attack symptoms the following morning. I called my Dr. and was admitted to the hospital, failed a stress test and had a heart catheterization that revealed a 90+% blockage. After angioplasty and a stent, I'm a new person. I really credit your program with preventing a major heart attack or worse. Please keep up the good work. Thank you.”

“In the communications and marketing areas, we don’t often have the opportunity to interact directly with patients,” Ms. Dezelan says. “Stories like these help us understand that for each one of us, the patient is at the heart of all we do.”

And the strategy appears to be working. “There is a definite correlation between the airing of segments and patients seeking care at UPMC,” she says. “While we don’t focus on this, it is nice to know that the segments also pay for themselves.”

In a little more than a year, UPMC created 21 different segments highlighting health topics (see sidebar). All of these are available in the 60-second and expanded interviews on upmc.com. UPMC now has a broad collection of UPMC Minutes that it can run interchangeably, well into the future.

To view the original segments and expanded versions of the interviews with more in-depth information, visit www.upmcminute.com.