Briefing: Quest Investors
Prior authorization automation company CoverMyMeds is willing to cover a lot more than medication. For employees, the company offers a chance to scratch an item off their bucket lists—free, as in fully-funded.
While workplace scholarships are not a new idea, CoverMyQuest allows participants to suggest their own ideas without meeting any specific criteria. The program offers eight $4,000 mini-grants to pursue winning pitches. With a monetary match from CoverMyMeds' new parent, global medical supplier McKesson, the number of winners has increased this year from five to eight and the grant amount has gone up $500.
Submissions were collected via lidded cardboard box and mulled over by five previous winners acting as judges.
Winners pitched everything from building a yurt—that one from Bryce Glass, product manager, incubation studio—to exploring Canadian glaciers—the pet project of Kelsey Shannahan, test engineer.
One winner, Deb Bitzan, database analyst, will be taking her mom to South Korea to visit family and Bitzan's grandmother's grave. Bitzan says, “My mom has spent her whole life caring for others, and I wanted to give her the opportunity to go home to South Korea to say ‘goodbye' to her mother, who passed in 2013. She has only been home twice in 30 years due to financial/personal hardship and logistical obstacles.” Bitzan has never been to South Korea and says she wants to visit a place so fundamental to her upbringing.
A team of two, Henry Frawley-Fulcher, manager of internal infrastructure, and Lars Johansson, facilities manager, will participate in the Rickshaw Run, a two-week, 3,000-km. race in a rickshaw across India. The race will raise money for Doctors Without Borders.
Other winners include Valerie Shoskes, apprentice software developer; Ash Watkins, account coordinator; Halley Immelt, graphic designer and Angela Masciarelli, PR manager.
CoverMyQuest is a program that not only makes dreams come true, but also touches the hearts of previous winners as they select next quests.
“Though it was extremely difficult to pick just eight winners, it was an immense privilege to be a CMQ judge,” says Jacquelyn Garcia, who last year was funded to work from a livable mobile office traveling wherever the whim of her coworkers took her.
“It was an excellent reminder that we work with an incredibly inspiring community of people here at CoverMyMeds. I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to all of our coworkers who shared with us a piece of their lives in their pitches,” she adds.
The creative CoverMyQuest program is one of the reasons CoverMyMeds has been a perennial winner in Columbus CEO's annual Top Workplaces recognition, placing No. 1 in their size category three out of the last four years.