The pandemic has raised the profile of chief medical officers like UP’s Dr. Gillis, but the role is steeped in railroad history
2/8/2022
By Julie Sneider, Senior Associate Editor
As essential service providers, railroads have played a significant role in helping North Americans manage their daily lives during the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic — from freighting medicine, vaccines, personal protection equipment and other vital goods to their destinations, to transporting the front-line workforce to critically important public-serving jobs.
Although other industries have faced periodic service shutdowns, railroads have kept the trains running. In so doing, they have carried on in their long tradition of coming to the nation’s aid during a health-care crisis. In fact, railroads had a fundamental role in developing the nation’s health-care system as U.S. citizens know it today.
As the transcontinental railway was under construction in the 1860s, railroads planted the roots of what is now occupational, industrial and emergency medicine. They hired doctors — and, in some cases, built hospitals — to treat rail workers who got hurt while laying the track and rail through remote and unpopulated regions of the country. Later, railway surgeons treated rail workers and passengers injured during train accidents.
The rail industry also helped establish the nation’s private health insurance system by creating hospital associations to provide medical care to sick or injured railway workers. At their peak, 35 different hospital associations served nearly a half million railroad workers with more than 3,700 hospital beds, according to Iron Road Healthcare, formerly known as the Union Pacific Railroad Employees Health System, which has been operating for over 140 years.
In 1947, the hospital associations became independent organizations dedicated to providing health-care coverage to rail employees, according to Iron Road Healthcare.
Although railroads no longer own or operate hospitals, many of the largest ones still employ medical doctors to manage their occupational and industrial medical programs. One of those physicians is Dr. Laura Gillis, who began her tenure as Union Pacific Railroad’s chief medical officer (CMO) on March 2, 2020, as the nation began shutting down in response to the pandemic.
Serving the Navy and the railroad
When Gillis arrived at UP, the Class I already had a “well-defined pandemic team” up and running to figure out how the railroad would protect the health and safety of its employees.
The COVID response team’s membership crossed departments, from legal to supply to operations to facilities, and included Gillis’s industrial hygiene team.
“The team was already a well-oiled machine” by the time she joined UP, she says.
“To become the first female chief medical officer on a railroad that was founded by Abe Lincoln was pretty cool. There’s so much history here.” — Dr. Laura Gillis, chief medical officer, Union Pacific Railroad Gillis started her career in the U.S. Navy, which paid for her medical education. After completing her internship at Pensacola Naval Hospital, she served as a flight surgeon in the Navy for five years.
“That experience was my first entrée into the world of occupational medicine,” she says. “It was the first time I realized that you could fit being a doctor into much more than being in a hospital or a clinic. Once I got outside the clinic and saw the value and unique opportunities associated with it, I was hooked.”
After leaving the Navy, Gillis pursued a master’s degree in public health at Johns Hopkins University, where she finished her residency in occupational and environmental medicine. From there, she opened a private practice in occupational medicine, contracting out with local companies for nine years — an experience that provided “a valuable foundation for my career,” she says.
Next, the U.S. Coast Guard hired Gillis as a civilian physician to head the medical certification division for merchant mariners. Three years later, she was lured away by BNSF Railway Co., where she was medical director for more than six years.
Then the UP opportunity arrived. Gillis couldn’t pass it up.
“To become the first female chief medical officer on a railroad that was founded by Abe Lincoln was pretty cool,” she says. “There’s so much history here.”
Pandemic response and other duties
Since Day 1, her job has involved keeping up with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 recommendations, distilling them into key points that explain internally how they will impact the workforce and business operations, and proposing options for how the company should comply. She also consults with other railroad CMOs and health professionals; at one point, they were meeting virtually every week to share best practices and benchmarks.
“It’s been a challenge and very dynamic, but also very fulfilling,” Gillis says.
Inside UP, she has become the face of health information for the workforce. She communicates COVID-related health messages through emails and on an internal web page and UP TV, which broadcasts company news on a loop shown in breakrooms and other places inside UP buildings.
Although responding to the pandemic has occupied much of her time at UP, as a CMO Gillis is responsible for anything that medically affects the company and its employees. For example, she determines fitness for duty when employees return to work following a medical condition, surgery or personal injury; oversees the return-to-work process for employees injured on the job; and reviews and oversees regulation-required medical exams.
“Railroading is impacted by regulations, and there are a lot of regulations that involve medical surveillance and exams,” Gillis explains. “Ultimately, the buck stops with me as far as determining how those programs work and the outcomes from specific cases.”
Moreover, Gillis oversees UP’s industrial hygiene team that monitors noise and other potential workplace hazards that can impact employee health.
She believes the pandemic has highlighted the CMO role — and changed it.
“Management now sees us in a slightly different light,” she says. “Within a week of my being here at UP, Omaha [the location of UP’s headquarters] completely shut down. COVID made my position either sink or swim.”
As a physician, Gillis had faced public health situations involving infectious diseases before: She was working during the SARS outbreak in 2003 and when Ebola was a potential threat in 2014.
“But neither of those situations was anything like this,” she says. “I don’t believe any of the physicians here [in the United States], unless they worked overseas, had any idea that COVID was going to impact us the way it did as doctors, patients and employees.”
If there’s been a silver lining to the pandemic, it’s that many employers are now more open to alternative work environments, Gillis believes.
“That being said, I never worked remotely and I do think there’s an element that’s lost in remote work,” she says. “So, it will be a balancing act. And maybe that is what the pandemic has taught us, that we need to be mindful of balance in our lives. It has given us the time to sit back and be reminded of what’s important.”