Latest / CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. / Protecting Healthcare Workers with Wearable Safety Tech w/ Canopy CEO Shan Sinha
Transcript
- 0:00Hospitals are stressful places and not just for patients.
- 0:03Physical and verbal assaults against staff are remarkably common, making a tough job scary as well.
- 0:10Employers want to give their staff peace of mind, but how can...
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- 1:29Welcome to Health Biz Briefs.
- 1:30I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group here with Sean Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Canopy.
- 1:36The company provides a duress alerting system for hospital workers and now for home care too.
- 1:41Welcome, Sean.
- 1:42Great to be here.
- 1:43Thanks a lot for having me, David.
- 1:44Sean, how big of an issue is violence in healthcare really and what's driving it?
- 1:49It's a huge issue, David.
- 1:51You know, I was in a room recently with nearly a dozen senior executives, CEOs, COOs of healthcare systems.
- 1:59representing thousands and thousands of beds of care.
- 2:03Every single leader of a health system highlighted how big of a problem this was.
- 2:08If not a top one issue, number one issue, it was a top three issue.
- 2:12Healthcare workers, I think most healthcare leaders here will know, five times more likely to encounter some sort of patient aggression, patient violence.
- 2:21It's affecting staff retention.
- 2:23It's affecting burnout, both directly and indirectly.
- 2:26Huge issue as we think about the stressors that are facing workforces and healthcare workforces today.
- 2:33And how does Canopy address the problem specifically in hospitals and any other kind of healthcare facility?
- 2:41One of the things that we have found over the last five years that we've been in business and over, you know, dozens of healthcare systems that we've worked with is that the challenges that staff are facing every single day have just been getting worse and worse when it comes to encountering patient aggression, patient violence.
- 3:04Many of the interventions that exist, more security guards, metal detectors, things like that, don't end up translating to having a direct impact on individuals because sadly, they end up finding themselves in a situation where they feel like it's just part of the job.
- 3:21So with Canopy, What we've done over the last five years is we pioneered a category of technology that we call wearable safety.
- 3:30So we've created with Canopy a single comprehensive platform that health systems can use to extend safety to everywhere their workers are delivering care.
- 3:45What makes our product particularly unique is that it is a simple wearable button that individuals can carry with them.
- 3:52for the video viewers on this, it looks just like this, that they can clip onto their badge and they can use that button to signal for help to summon any resources that the hospital might have available that can help intervene whenever a patient starts to get aggressive or violence.
- 4:08Over the last five years, David, we're now protecting 200,000 people around the country.
- 4:13We have seen dramatic impact to organizations ability to not only support their staff, but also help them feel like they have organizations and leadership that care about them.
- 4:25And it's ultimately a positive impact to their everyday well-being at work, along with improving the relationship they have with their organizations.
- 4:35It sounds like an appropriate approach for a hospital where there's a lot of people to come and help out a staff member who may be experiencing some aggression.
- 4:47But a lot of care is occurring outside of the hospital.
- 4:50And it's not going to be practical to have just a bunch of people around for a home care visit, just in case something were were to happen.
- 4:57Now, I could imagine that violence might be a little bit less of an issue in somebody's own home than the hospital.
- 5:02But nonetheless, how do you deal with this?
- 5:05And I could especially imagine, let's say a nurse who's used to working in a facility and having that canopy button available when they go out into somebody else's home.
- 5:14They may feel a little bit exposed if they don't have that.
- 5:17What's your solution there?
- 5:18Yeah, the sad reality is that caregivers are encountering patient aggression, patient violence everywhere they go, everywhere they work.
- 5:27I mean, we hear stories about staff, obviously, the four doors or the four walls, inside the four walls of their facilities.
- 5:35We hear stories about staff in their parking lots and parking garages on their way into work and on their way home from work, for which we also have a solution.
- 5:46But as you and your listeners probably know, home care is growing by 33 % over the next five years as we're looking at home care as a solution to a lot of the overcapacity that we have in our hospitals.
- 6:03And so it turns out incidents happen in homes as frequently as they do outside or in the hospitals themselves.
- 6:14And so we created a solution called Canopy Go, which is part of the single comprehensive wearable safety platform that we make available to hospitals.
- 6:23Solution is very simple.
- 6:25The same button, that wearable button that we provide to individuals can be used when you go into somebody's home to signal for help from local law enforcement, gives you an instant connection to 911.
- 6:37It automatically notifies your hospital security so that they can coordinate.
- 6:42It provides GPS information, provides your name, provides contact information so that help can be summoned to wherever you are so you don't ever actually feel alone whenever you're going in environments that could be very scary.
- 6:56you know, what will be familiar to most of your healthcare workers is when you're going into people's homes, A, it can be very lonely.
- 7:03B, you never know what kind of environment you might be going into.
- 7:06And your job as a healthcare worker is to deliver care.
- 7:10first and foremost, regardless of who you might be delivering care to, which might involve drug dealers and gang members and all sorts of other types of environments.
- 7:20And we've been able to offer a pretty significant intervention and a very impactful intervention for health care systems to provide safety to all their caregivers, no matter where they have to work.
- 7:34Well, that's it for the latest Health Biz Brief.
- 7:36If you like what you hear, check out my Health Biz podcast for a full length interview with Sean about his life and career.
- 7:43Sean Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Canopy, thanks for joining me today on Health Biz Briefs.
- 7:48Thanks a lot for having me, David.