Maine Healthcare System Rolls Out Canopy Wearable Help Buttons For All Staff

Every employee at St. Mary’s Health System in Lewiston, Maine, now wears a button that can summon nearby colleagues and security when they need help.

In August, the healthcare system rolled out Canopy, a new safety platform that connects to all five of the system’s locations, giving all 1,220 employees wearable duress buttons they can use to quickly call for help. All clinical and non-clinical staff have access to the new technology, and since its rollout, staff report feeling safer and more supported. 

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“This really came from listening to our staff,” Jill Rollins, Chief Nursing Officer and Chief Operating Officer at St. Mary’s, tells Nurse.org. “We heard from employees who had been in situations where they needed help but couldn’t easily get to a phone or otherwise call for assistance. We took those concerns seriously and wanted to make sure employees had a way to quickly get help when they needed it.”

A wearable help button seems like a simple solution, but it has been a long time in the making, both as a company and as a resource for healthcare organizations. 

The idea for Canopy dates back to 2018 at Jefferson Health in Philadelphia, where Canopy’s founders worked with the health system’s security and facilities team on a Bluetooth location tag, explains Jason Fass, Chief Marketing Officer at Canopy. 

During that time, the hospital’s security asked a simple question: could the tag also work as a duress button? 

That question, notes Fass, kicked off a two-year co-development process with Jefferson’s security team, frontline caregivers, risk management, facilities, legal, HR, and IT to figure out how to scale a wearable duress button across a multi-hospital system. 

According to Fass, one of the system’s defining features came from a unit manager who asked whether the button could alert her directly when a security response might take several minutes. Canopy built that request into the platform it now deploys at other health systems: alerts go to nearby colleagues as well as security, so help can arrive before a situation escalates.

When a staff member double-presses the button, Canopy’s real-time location network identifies nearby colleagues and alerts them so they can check in, Fass explains. He says those proximity alerts go to colleagues who have opted in, and security is notified at the same time with the employee’s ID and location.

“The point of routing it this way, rather than only to a distant security desk, is that the colleagues already on the floor can often step in before security can physically get there,” notes Fass. “This turns a single activation into a coordinated response, and turns every participating colleague into part of the safety culture rather than leaving one nurse alone with a button.”

Additionally, Canopy isn’t just for clinical staff or people working inside the hospital. Everyone from clinical to non-clinical employees has access to the technology, including in places like parking lots where getting to a phone isn’t always practical. 

Nurse.org knows that workplace safety is an ongoing and constant concern for nurses and other clinical staff, so it is reassuring to hear from Aaron Johnson, Director of Risk & Emergency Management at St. Mary’s, that feedback from staff really helped drive the decision to bring Canopy to campus. 

He explains that feedback from safety surveys, event reviews, and the Workplace Violence Prevention Committee, bringing frontline staff together from across the organization, all pointed to the importance of a safety solution. (Do you hear that, nurses? Fill out those surveys, because they do matter!) 

“Our staff asked for a solution that would help them feel safer at work and give them a simple way to request assistance during challenging situations,” Johnson noted. 

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Canopy was rolled out at St. Mary’s in August, and nurses who are wearing the duress buttons report they do feel safer with the system.

“With these buttons attached to our badges, it’ll just make us feel a lot safer with that quicker response and also notify our team members that we need help,” says Jess, a charge nurse at St. Mary’s. “That way, we’re not feeling like we’re alone in a dangerous situation.”

Johnson says that, as expected, there have been a few accidental activations. All team members treated the button deploys as real until the all-clear assurance was made. So, in the team’s mind, even the accidents were good practice and confirmation that the response process works.

To Johnson, employees fully realizing that the tools do work and are available to them when they need them is key. 

“The buttons have been utilized when employees need assistance and are becoming another part of the safety resources available to our staff,” he points out. “Most importantly, employees know they have a direct way to alert others when they need help.”

🤔 Nurses: Does your facility offer a wearable duress button? How does it work? Tell us in the comments.