Mission Meets Margin— Paul Lim, MBA ’06
This article was originally published in the Winter 2021 edition of the Chatham Recorder Alumni Magazine. To view the full magazine, click here.
In early 2021, Wheeling Hospital merged with WVU Medicine, West Virginia’s premier provider of advanced heart, vascular, thoracic, cancer, pediatric, and neurological care.
In a University release, president and CEO of the WVU Health System Albert L. Wright, Jr said, “Our commitment to the people of Wheeling and the surrounding area is to ensure this hospital remains an integral part of the community while remaining true to its core mission, values, and Catholic beliefs.”
Enter Paul Lim, MBA ’06. As the inaugural Vice-President for Mission Integration, Lim’s role is to ensure that the hospital retains its Catholic identity. “There’s no job that’s better than what I have now,” he says.
Born and raised in Jacksonville, FL, Lim attended St. Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology. St. Meinrad’s mission is to prepare men for some sort of Catholic Church service, but Lim soon discovered that he wanted to serve in a different way. He transferred to Loyola University of Chicago, from which he graduated with a BS in Social Work. In Chicago he met the woman who would become his wife, who was from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh seemed “pretty cool,” says Lim, and he soon got a job there at Holy Family Institute, staffing a group home of teenagers.
Eventually he returned to school—to the University of Pittsburgh, from which he earned his Master of Social Work. “When I finished, I realized that the MSW by itself was not enough. At the time, what I wanted to do was to head up a charitable foundation, and I knew that in order to do that, I needed to speak the language,” says Lim. “I wanted to get an MBA. And Chatham has one for healthcare professionals! It was cool because there were a lot of people like me—there were nurses, a physician, all sorts of people—and we were all there for the same reason, because we wanted to be people who work in healthcare that can do more.”
“It was a program that really met my needs,” he continues. “I was able to really look at my practice and consider what I wanted to achieve from a business point of view. For example, in social work school I wrote a paper on psychiatric advanced directives and their benefits. I get to the MBA program, and I found that I could write part two of that paper: how psychiatric advanced directives save money, time, and suffering. And so the MBA was the perfect continuation for my MSW. And of course it was at Chatham and I was a big fan of small, liberal arts schools.”
“When I started the MBA program, someone said to me ‘When you finish this program, you think it’s going to go to work for you right away. That may not be the case. You have to continue in your profession, and then slowly as opportunities come, and that’s when you’re really going to pull from your MBA’. And that’s for the most part true, but I used it right off the bat.”
““I wanted to get an MBA. And Chatham has one for healthcare professionals! It was cool because there were a lot of people like me—there were nurses, a physician, all sorts of people—and we were all there for the same reason, because we wanted to be people who work in healthcare that can do more.””
Lim got a job at a nursing home alternative program, which needed a social worker who could also do marketing. “And so I was perfect for it: I had the MSW and an MBA,” he says. He stayed for two years, and then went to UPMC St. Margaret, where he started as a staff social worker, then became the supervisor of social work, and finally the care management director. “And this is where I was really able to pull from what I learned at Chatham,” he says. “When you’re the care management director, you’re in charge of two things: appropriate utilization of resources and safe discharge planning. To be good stewards of your resources, you have to understand them, where they come from and where they’re going. It’s my arena: where mission meets margin, in care management. So I couldn’t figure out what was better than that until I came to Wheeling.”
Lim has been in his position since June, and, he says, he has loved every minute of it. “The people here are wonderful and I’m happy to support them. Right now they want to do good work but they’re undergoing a transition, so the fact that I get to ground us and support our heritage is such a privilege.”
At WVU Medicine Wheeling Hospital, Lim’s priorities are not only the appropriate use of resources and safe discharge planning, but also the hospital’s mission and identity. “My job is to make sure that as Wheeling Hospital goes full force into WVU Medicine, it doesn’t forget where it came from,” he says. “Mission meets margin in my office. You will never see mission sacrificed for margin. In my job, I get to make sure that that’s the case.”
Lim says that he’s still trying to figure out what his job looks like day-to-day. “I commute from Pittsburgh—it’s about 50 miles—and I like to get here early. I am two doors down from the hospital chapel, and I’ll spend a few minutes in there thinking about where am I going to be best used today? What can I do to support Wheeling Hospital today? From there it’s quite wide-ranging. I have oversight of what we call the transitional care clinic, which does a lot of follow-up visits to patients who are discharged, making sure they have what they need. I also have a lot of meetings with folks from outside the hospital because it’s all about partnership.”
““Mission meets margin in my office. You will never see mission sacrificed for margin. In my job, I get to make sure that that’s the case.””
One partnership that Lim is particularly proud of is that of his hospital and Catholic Charities West Virginia. “Sometimes people come to us for medical issues, and we learn that there are social determinants that also need to be overcome—such as a lack of running water, or a level of health literacy that means that they don’t know what to do with a prescription. As these patients are identified, we introduce them to a charity that now has an office in our hospital, and our patients have access to an array of services that the charity provides. I am so proud that we’re able to work with Catholic Charities West Virginia. To me, our partnership is groundbreaking.”
A new partnership with a Wheeling street paper (a newspaper that caters to the homeless and the impoverished) is also near and dear to his heart. “I started a collaboration between WVU Medicine Wheeling and a new street paper called Mustard Seed Mountain. It’s a pretty awesome endeavor. I contacted the people who run this paper and told them that this is perfect in terms of where we need to go—to look after the people who are on the fringes, poor, marginalized, outcasts. I went to the president and said if we don’t do this, we’re missing a big thing here. He said ‘I agree, buy the back page.’ A lot of my work is partnering with people in the community to make sure they have access to good healthcare.” Lim plans to ask the hospital’s family practitioners to write articles for the paper.
In June 2020, Lim was ordained a deacon in the Catholic Diocese in Pittsburgh. “That has been really cool,” he says. “The first deacons were stewards for those who didn’t have much. A lot of deacons in the church have to figure out how to be deacons in their workplaces. I don’t have that. I get to be a deacon at work. Deacons are tasked with service. Their job is to care for the poor and the marginalized while they baptize and spread the word.”
I ask Lim what he finds most rewarding about his role. “In this role, I’ve had to talk to a lot of people,” he says. “And I remember the first time I was going to talk with someone from the media. I said to the CEO, ‘What do you want me to say?’ And he looked at me and was like, ‘Tell them about the underserved! Tell them about the people who need us!’ And I was so moved by that. When he said that, I knew I was in the right place.”
Click here to learn more about Chatham’s MBA program, which offers specialized concentrations in Healthcare Management, Accounting, Information Management, Supply Chain Management, Project Management, Food & Agriculture, Sustainability, and Entrepreneurial Leadership & Strategy.