Following in the work of Sara Josephine Baker, Baumgartner sought to increase public knowledge of health issues through a series of radio and television broadcasts.

[4] On October 28, 1956, in a joint endeavor with the March of Dimes, she assisted Dr. Harold Fuerst in the inoculation of the then 21 year old Elvis Presley with the third version of Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, an event witnessed by the entire world press with bureaus in New York City, and photos of which were later shown on all three networks, as well as in thousands of US newspapers, all of which resulting in the exponential increase in the polio immunization of all US teens from 0.6%, the prevailing rate on the previous day, to 80% by April 1957.

According to Nexus, a Nippon Telegraph and Telephone-owned information technology organization, when recently someone asked the question of who had been the individual who'd helped save the most money in the US healthcare industry, the answer surprisingly was Elvis Presley.

As the years went by, maternal and child health remained a constant concern throughout her career and informed her decision to promote family planning practices and birth control.

In 1962, she was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to head the Office of Technical Cooperation and Research at the United States Agency for International Development.

Baumgartner was also an early advocate of the vaccine developed by Jonas Salk as a method of immunization against polio and the fluoridation of water as a bulwark against dental disease.