The bottom line:
- Cleveland Bakers & Teamsters Health and Welfare Fund faced a significant challenge: cardiovascular disease was a top claim issue, but the demanding schedules of union members made engaging members difficult.
- Partnering with Hello Heart, they reached high-risk members and helped them take control of their heart health. Ultimately, 70% of their members using Hello Heart saw improvements in their blood pressure.
- The fund also saw an $1,800 decrease in annual healthcare costs per engaged member, achieving a 3:1 ROI on the program.
For Taft-Hartley fund leaders, taking care of union members’ health is less a job and more a personal commitment they make to their community.
That is especially true for Abby Pecoraro, administrative manager for the Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Health and Welfare Fund. Growing up in a union family, Abby watched her father spend 43 years helping members navigate challenges, understand their benefits, and take care of their families.
“As I got older and I really got to be at those events with him and see the impact he was making on people’s lives, it really drew me in to want to make that same impact,” Abby shared.
Today, that same service mindset shapes how Cleveland Bakers & Teamsters Fund approaches health benefits. The fund supports members across more than 100 employers and nine unions, including bakers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, railroad workers, blood collectors, zookeepers, security workers, and more. Many work long shifts, overnight schedules, physically demanding jobs, and irregular hours that can make it hard to prioritize preventive care.
As the fund began looking more closely at its healthcare cost drivers in 2022, it became clear that cardiovascular risk was too important, and too urgent, to ignore.
“Cardiovascular has always been one of our top claim issues,” Abby said. “We just got to a point as a fund where we said: we need to do something about this.”
The challenge: Heart health support has to fit real labor schedules
In the labor space, engagement is never as simple as sending one email and waiting for members to sign up.
Members may be working at 3 a.m., driving overnight, stocking shelves, running production lines, or coming home from a shift just as their family’s day is beginning. Many are managing stress, lack of sleep, and limited time for doctor visits. Others may only get their blood pressure checked once a year during a wellness screening, or less.
For Cleveland Bakers & Teamsters Fund, the right heart health solution needed to meet members in that reality.
“In the labor world, it’s hard to get people to do things. Engagement can be tough,” Abby said. “The easier things can be, the better.”
Hello Heart stood out because it was simple for members to use on their own time. Members could enroll by text or online, receive a connected blood pressure monitor at home, and begin checking their heart health in a way that fit into their day, whether that day started at 4 a.m., 11 p.m., or somewhere in between.
“Hello Heart is a very quick text, sign up, show up at your door, and move along kind of program. Members love that it’s easy,” Abby said.
A health benefit built for the whole member population
The fund’s membership reflects the diversity of modern labor. Abby notes that more women are entering the labor space, including many who are balancing shift work, caregiving, household responsibilities, and their own health needs at the same time.
That makes convenience and simplicity central to whether the members can engage at all.
“Something like Hello Heart is an easy piece to that woman’s day who may be the person working the night shift and coming home and getting the kids and making dinner and then trying to sleep somewhere in the process,” Abby said.
Hello Heart gives working women a way to check in on their heart health and receive AI-driven, personalized coaching from anywhere: Home, between shifts, after family responsibilities, or whenever they have a few minutes. For a population that may not always have time to make themselves the priority, Hello Heart provides women with the tailored, easy-to-use preventive health technology they need.
From one annual reading to everyday insight
Before Hello Heart, some fund members only saw their blood pressure during an annual wellness visit. For some, a high reading could be dismissed as “white coat syndrome,” where readings are higher in patient care settings. But with regular at-home monitoring, members were able to see patterns more clearly and take action sooner.
Abby shared that some members realized their blood pressure was not just elevated during a single wellness screening, but all year-round. They connected the dots between their health behaviors and their risk factors and took steps to track and manage their heart health more consistently.
“We have seen people work to really bring that down,” she said. “They may not have passed that piece of their wellness the prior year, but they’re passing it now because they worked to get those numbers improved.”
That kind of progress is meaningful for a fund office that sees itself as a long-term partner in members’ lives. Abby describes the fund’s approach as “cradle to grave,” supporting members and their dependents from the time they enter the union all the way through retirement.
Results that matter to members and the fund
Since implementing Hello Heart in 2022, Cleveland Bakers & Teamsters Fund has continued to see steady engagement in the program. Today, more than 1,000 members are enrolled.
The fund has seen measurable improvements among Hello Heart users, including:
- 70% of users seeing improvement in their blood pressure
- More than $1,800 in annual healthcare cost savings per engaged member
- A 3:1 ROI for the fund on the program
For Abby, these numbers are important, but the human impact behind them is what makes the work most rewarding.
“Now being able to see people really improve their health and coming back to their wellness and say, ‘Hey, I got to pass this one,’ is a rewarding feeling for the fund office,” Abby said. “Things that we’re doing are not just a step in my day. It’s actually impacting somebody’s life.”
The fund has also seen engaged members begin to manage their health differently. Rather than defaulting to the emergency room when something feels off, some members are connecting with specialists or primary care providers and taking a more proactive role in their care.
That shift away from acute care and toward preventive care can help members stay healthier long-term, and protects the fund’s budget for healthcare claims, too.
A health AI platform with a human impact
For Taft-Hartley funds, the best benefits are not just clinically sound or financially valuable, but also truly understand and work for the people they are meant to serve.
That means making health programs easy to understand, easy to access, and realistic for members whose schedules and responsibilities may not look like a traditional 9-to-5 workday. With Hello Heart’s AI-driven coaching and connected devices, funds can scale highly personalized health services to every member who needs them.
“I would definitely recommend Hello Heart for anyone that wants to make an improvement to the health of their people,” Abby said. “When you can do one easy thing that can meet the member where they are to make a big impact, there’s no question that this should be added to that program.”
For Cleveland Bakers & Teamsters Fund, Hello Heart has become one more way to carry forward a deeply familiar labor value: taking care of the people who take care of so much else for their families and communities.
Learn more about how Hello Heart supports labor union members.
