Hospitals have consistently surged past capacity throughout the pandemic, leaving healthcare workers understaffed and under-resourced in a
In short, many did not. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the healthcare industry has lost nearly one million workers since February of 2020. Meanwhile, Nursing Solutions Inc. found that since 2016, hospitals have turned over about 83% of its nurses and 90% of its overall workforce. The cost of turnover for bedside nurses alone could cost a hospital as much as $6.5 million a year. It seems for the sake of hospitals and patients, the U.S. needs its healthcare works to stay.
For Rebecca Metter, co-founder and CEO of Wambi, the key to retention lies in reminding healthcare workers why they wanted to work in healthcare and stripping away the notion that it is a thankless job.
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“No one goes into health care without wanting to help patients,” says Metter. “Wambi helps to reconnect healthcare workers back to their ‘why’ by letting them hear the stories that patients share about the impact that they received from a human-to-human connection with their healthcare worker.”
Wambi is a digital platform where patients and their families can express gratitude for the healthcare workers they connected with in an inpatient setting. Healthcare workers can also use Wambi to offer each other thanks and feedback. Now, through its partnership with healthcare tech company Gozio, this tool is integrated into more health systems across the country, such as the University of Miami Health System, which includes three hospitals and over 1,200 physicians and scientists.
“Gozio is plugging Wambi into our platform and giving it a home,” says Joshua Titus, CEO of Gozio. “Hospitals within a given health system will provide this as a benefit to their staff, patients and visitors.”
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The Gozio mobile platform offers patients features like indoor hospital navigation, appointment scheduling, access to electronic health records and urgent care and emergency department wait times. This collaboration means thanking a health care provider can be just as easy as making a doctor’s appointment – but the payoff can make an even bigger difference.
Gratitude can be a game-changer for healthcare workers and patients alike. Wambi claims 62% more healthcare workers feel valued at their job after six months of using the platform. Additionally, with the help of Wambi, the CareWell Health Medical Center in New Jersey, formerly East Orange General Hospital, saw their nurse voluntary turnover rate improve by 53% in 2019.
Metter’s own personal history inspires her work and the need to highlight the extraordinary efforts of this population.
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“My co-founder, Alexandra Coren, and I are both daughters of parents who suffered from chronic illnesses,” she says. “We saw firsthand the beauty that can exist between a caregiver, a patient, and their family members — in those relationships we found safety and hope in a time of chaos.”
But while healthcare workers represented a lifeline to patients and loved ones, Metter and Coren noticed that these workers did not feel seen and were disengaged. So, they wanted to remind healthcare staff, whether they are doctors, nurses, technicians or environmental service workers, that their work had made a difference, even if that difference amounted to putting a smile on a patient’s face, Metter explains.
“There are micro-moments that shape a patient’s experience, whether it’s the environmental services worker who sang to a patient while cleaning the room or the technician who loaned the patient a charger when she needed to call her husband after coming out of a surgery,” she says. “Now patients have a very unique opportunity to share the impact they received from every person who had a role in caring for them.”
