Danica Patrick to promote local hospital campaign
Professional race car driver Danica Patrick will be the face, the voice and the role model behind a new Edward-Elmhurst Healthcare campaign that encourages people to set goals and become healthier.
The “Healthy Driven” campaign comes with challenges people can take to improve their nutritional, physical or emotional health, and Pam Davis, Edward-Elmhurst CEO, said it's about motivating people to get healthy.
“We really, truly want every individual to determine the elements they need to live a healthy driven life,” she said.
As the world's best-known woman in professional car racing, and as an Illinois native, Patrick stood out as the “perfect partner” for encouraging health, Davis said. Patrick, 32, and a native of Roscoe, north of Rockford, will be in the suburbs Jan. 22 for a major health expo in Lombard billed as the Healthy Driven 500.
“She's symbolic of this whole campaign,” Davis said. “She works out. She eats healthy. She's tough and intense but very approachable.”
In addition to being the campaign spokeswoman in TV, radio, newspaper and magazine ads, Patrick will donate $1 every time someone accepts a challenge on healthydriven.com. Up to $10,000 she committed will support the fight against childhood obesity in the Edward-Elmhurst service area in the West and Southwest suburbs.
Challenges on the website are divided into nutritional, physical and emotional categories. Participants select a category, then click to spin a wheel for a suggested goal, such as: try a new healthy food, eat more fiber, attend a play or concert, do a brain teaser, use a heart monitor while exercising or quit smoking. If the challenge isn't a good fit, participants can spin again until they're ready to click “accept.”
The campaign is going social on Twitter with #healthydriven. Those who accept challenges can personalize an image of Patrick by adding their own picture and post it to social media profiles.
“We hope this will help us go viral with our employees, patients and prospective patients,” said Brian Davis, vice president and chief marketing officer for Edward-Elmhurst Healthcare.
The challenges on healthydriven.com are examples to get people thinking about how to drive their health forward. “It's a motivational website to get people in the right frame of mind to make healthy changes,” he said.
People don't have to be Edward-Elmhurst patients to participate, although they must live in Illinois to be eligible for prizes such as a FitBit activity tracker or a membership to one of the health system's fitness centers.
The campaign comes more than a year after Edward Hospital in Naperville merged with Elmhurst Hospital and roughly a year after the Affordable Care Act took effect. The merged system's CEO said the new health care law emphasizes keeping patients well, a goal the two hospitals wholeheartedly support.
“We want to have people experience this wonderful healthy driven attitude anytime they have a touch point with our system,” she said.