There are more than 2.3 million workplace injuries a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, with most of them being neuromuscular injuries.
Treating people in her Oshkosh physical therapy practice led Sara Ziegele to recognize an opportunity for a more proactive approach.
“When I treat people clinically … a lot of what I do is educate people about how it happened and how they can prevent it from happening again,” she says.
Those conversations helped her realize, “A lot of the things I’m treating never had to happen in the first place. They could have been prevented had they come and talked to me first.”
Ziegele, who is a doctor of physical therapy with more than a decade of experience, began searching for a way to address workplace injuries and reduce costs for businesses and employees.
She established Preempt Physical Therapy LLC in 2022 as an addition to the clinical practice she founded in 2021 when her family moved to the area.
Her methods differ from the traditional, top-down approach of offering incentives and enforcing policies.
Instead, she conducts risk analysis, leadership training and employee empowerment. The process starts with Ziegele reviewing injury data and reports for a specific business as well as observing the workplace and offering concrete solutions that she emphasizes are often simple and low-cost to implement.
Employees feel empowered by her approach, Ziegele says, and there are better results when employees understand the personal benefits and are not driven by incentives and policies.
As a startup business, she says she has the advantage of being adaptable to the needs of business clients. Ziegele says she can customize her services more readily than can a larger organization.
Ziegele continues to offer treatment through her clinical practice but hopes to scale Preempt as she becomes more integrated into the community and makes professional connections.
“I try to work myself out of jobs every time,” Ziegele says.
