New Upstate Family Health Center CEO outlines goals

ROME — Upstate Family Health Center, Inc.’s new CEO brings more than just years of experience in the health-care industry to the role. She also carries a desire to help those in need and hopes to grow the organization to help even more people. Andreea Mera on Nov. 6 started in her new leadership role at Upstate Family Health Center, a licensed health-care center offering family health-care services to individuals of all ages at locations in the Mohawk Valley. “It’s been quite an experience,” Mera says of the job, which has been full of both the expected and the unexpected. There are two things that have really struck Mera about upstate. First is the diversity of the population the health-care organization serves, which includes about 80 percent of the refugee population in the greater Utica area. The other standout is the staff. “I think the one thing that makes us stand out is … most of the people who work here work here because they want to,” she says. Many of the employees have had their own experiences that, in turn, make them very empathetic when interacting with the people Upstate serves. Her hope is that level of empathetic care will help attract new patients to Upstate Family Health, which operates clinics in Rome, Utica, and in six school-based clinics. To help drive that increase, Mera says she’s focused on finding creative ways to provide people the care they need when they need it. “I want to be the place where patients come to because they want to, not because they have to,” she says. The majority of Upstate Family Health Center’s patient population is on Medicaid. It provides a sliding fee for co-payments to ensure that people can receive care, which includes primary care, occupational therapy, mental/behavioral health services, and substance-abuse care. The health-care provider also operates a mobile integrated health vehicle to visit patients in their homes and a Hepatitis C program that delivered a cure to 50 patients last year. Mera doesn’t originally come from a health-care background. She came to the United States from Romania 25 years ago and remembers well the uncertainty that came with having no health-insurance coverage and no money to pay for it. While Mera originally went to school for criminal justice with thoughts of becoming a lawyer, she started working in the New York City public hospital system in 2012. While pursuing her MBA in health-care administration, she held various leadership roles within the organization. Mera also pursued a master’s degree in pharmacy policy and regulation — all with the goal of obtaining a comprehensive understanding of all the major players in the health-care system and leveraging that knowledge to help patients further. She had a desire to work in a hospital setting so she could take all that she learned on the administrative side and put her “boots on the ground” where she could make a real difference. Mera became familiar with the Utica–Rome area through her love of fly fishing and ended up buying a house near Syracuse before landing with Upstate Family Health Center. The organization appealed to her because, “the mission is the [one] I’ve worked for and I’ve worked toward for my entire career,” Mera explains. The mission is simply to build a healthy community through empowering and partnering with patients. “This organization has tremendous potential,” she says of Upstate Family Health Center. “We are looking to transform and provide the best care we can, and that’s where we’re going.”