The ‘Compassionate Care Movement’ with Alex Coren, Co-Founder & Chief Innovation Officer at Wambi

This episode is about nothing less than elevating the human condition at the forefront of healthcare delivery.  It is about enriching and empowering professional caregivers through real-time written feedback from the patients they care for, so that they can, in turn, create a sustained culture of caring, comfort, compassion, trust and safety for patients and patients’ families.

The solution we’ll discuss this week focuses on directly recognizing & appreciating the professionals and staff who are, all-too-often, the unsung frontline heroes of healthcare delivery.

Our guest this week is Alex Coren – a female entrepreneur, inventor, digital tech wizard & international speaker who was named #1 female student entrepreneur in the U.S.   In 2016 she formed a company called Wambi.  In 2017, she formed Carepostcard and Humans of Wambi – two other products which elevate humanism in healthcare.  Her overarching mission is to catalyze what she has named, ‘The Compassionate Care Movement’.

Alex is an impressive and inspiring leader.   She is a powerhouse of purpose, passion & productivity.  What she is doing to improve care in the acute and post acute setting is so simple and so ingenious that you’ll wonder why no one has thought about this or done it up until now.  Her personal story is equally as compelling, and provides some explanation for what catalyzed her to create such a unique and innovative contribution.  Alex grew up with two parents who were chronically ill – constantly in and out of the acute care healthcare settings.  Over the course of years, she observed, up close and personal, the essential vulnerability and dependence of being a patient in the hospital setting.

As a result, she developed a tremendous gratitude, respect and deep admiration for those frontline caregivers that worked tirelessly to care for her parents, and for her. It may come as no surprise, that her first job was in an acute care facility, being a manager responsible for patient experience.  What she observed in this role – to her surprise – was the widespread depersonalization that frontline providers & staff experienced – literally the sense of ‘not being seen’ or recognized.  She also observed the outcomes – which included depersonalized care, lower patient satisfaction, worse outcomes of care, low employee morale, and an extremely high staff turnover rate.

Out of these challenging experiences as a child, her early empathetic professional observations, and her brilliant and bold mind, she created Wambi.  Wambi is a patient-driven, healthcare employee performance platform aimed at recognizing and empowering compassionate care.  It uniquely addresses patient satisfaction where it starts – with the care providers – through the eyes of patients and their families.  It’s a gamified digital platform informed by real-time patient/family feedback, which supports care providers with individualized patient/customer experience data as a means to promote autonomy and inspire sustained behavioral change.   This product serves to improve care provider engagement, decrease staff turnover and burnout, and elevate the patient experience.  And it works.  The hospitals her team have deployed the Wambi platform in have experienced up to a 20% decrease in staff turnover within 5 months times; a 30 to 40% increase in staff engagement, and double digit increases in HCAHPS scores.

Alex Coren and her team come at this serious & long-standing problem in healthcare with a fresh perspective and a new set of solutions.  This is an essential ‘must-listen’ podcast interview for any manager and/or leader involved in hospital, post acute care or home healthcare, who wants to create a culture of compassion.

The contents of this interview are compelling enough.  But there is more to the story.  This dialogue with Alex is a profound lesson in leadership – a lesson in the art of simplicity, gratitude, courage and conviction.  Alex’s sense of purpose is palpable.  Her bold entrepreneurial spirit, and the humanistic mission she and her team are on, are hugely inspiring.  In this interview, I ask her for her secret ‘super-power’.  It’s well worth the listen just to hear her response to that question.

I hope you appreciate and benefit from this dialogue as much as I have!