Consistently ranked as one of the best companies to work for, WellStar Health Systems is strengthening its reputation with its new online scheduling tool: Smart Square.
Named to Working Mother’s 10 family-friendly employers list, Fortune Magazine’s list of top 100 employers and a six-time recipient of the “When Work Works” honor from the Society for Human Resource Management, WellStar is well-recognized as a flexible and accommodating employer, according to National Journal.
The nonprofit is a health care network employing more 12,000 in Marietta, Ga. With 83 percent of it employees being female, WellStar offers services to ease the balance between work and home life. In addition to a traditional pension plan, WellStar provides an on-site day care center and a concierge that coordinates dry cleaning pickups, oil changes and grocery shopping.
Smart Square, though, is what’s really transforming the lives of WellStar workers. The company’s nurses work long shifts and advanced knowledge of work hours is one of the most useful pieces of information employers can provide as it gives the employee time to schedule home duties. This is exactly what Smart Square helps with.
Erica Kilpatrick is a WellStar nurse who also juggles home life and caring for her mother, who is currently in the hospital. Due to this hectic lifestyle, Smart Square gives Kilpatrick the chance to plan her three 12-hour shifts according to her needs.
“Smart Square equalizes everything,” Kilpatrick tells National Journal. “I get called to where the greatest need is.”
How does it work? Up to eight weeks in advance, employees can start signing up for working shifts through Smart Square. (While they have the flexibility to work hours of their choosing, all employees must work the required holiday and weekend shifts.) Managers have the final say on scheduling approval, but the process is collaborative between employer and employee — rather than a dictation of hours that must be worked.
One disadvantage of the system? It can’t account for the unpredictability of life in the medical profession. Since the appropriate nurse-to-patient ratio must be followed, during hectic times, employees may be called in to work with only one or two days’ notice.
Despite this, though, Smart Square is still very efficient, especially since the app allows the nurses to manage their shifts and sign up for additional ones.
“It definitely has opened up that ability for the nurse to have a lot more control over his or her schedule,” Kris Betts, WellStar’s assistant vice president for workforce engineering, says. “It’s not, ‘I’m hiring you specifically for Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and you’d better be there on those days.’ This way is a lot more fluid.”
Which companies will be next to implement employee-friendly apps like this?
MORE: Could 3-D Printing Help Find A Cure For Cancer?
Category: Bridging the Opportunity Divide
Why Does This Housing Complex Have Seniors Reaching for a Paintbrush?
For some seniors — especially those who’ve engaged in the arts all their lives — watching TV or playing shuffleboard or bingo simply doesn’t qualify as stimulating entertainment.
That’s why the nonprofit EngAGE is bringing all kinds of high-quality arts activities, from painting to theater, to affordable senior housing complexes in southern California. The group even spurred the creation of several unique arts colonies just for seniors: the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, the NoHo Senior Arts Colony and the Long Beach Senior Arts Colony. These housing complexes ensure that residents’ lives are enriched with arts through such activities as theater groups, a fine arts collective, music programming, an indie film company and an intergenerational arts program that brings in the kids in from the Burbank Unified School District to create art with the seniors.
EnGAGE founder Tim Carpenter worked in the healthcare industry when he teamed up with housing developer John Huskey to build this new type of senior living community. To start, they offered a creative writing class at one housing complex. From there, the reach of their services expanded, touching people who don’t live in the retirement communities, but are attracted to the arts programming that they offer.
“You have this great synergy of the physical amenities with the intellectual ones,” Carpenter tells NEA Arts Magazine. “And so that tends to be powerful within the community itself. It also becomes an attractor to people from the outside community…to have a place where people want to go to learn because it’s a beautiful building and there are interesting people living there.”
Caroline McElroy is an artist “in permanent residence” at the NoHo Senior Arts Colony in North Hollywood. She teaches a weekly collage class that’s scheduled to run 90 minutes, but often ends up lasting for hours as seniors get lost in their creations.
McElroy says that the Colony “is a place of possibilities. My son-in-law goes, ‘So how long do you plan on living here?’ and I said, ‘Honey, they’re going to have to carry me out of here.’”
MORE: These Startups Offer Sleek Technological Innovations for the Elderly
Watch Why This Crossing Guard Breaks Down After He Tries to a Move Parked Car
For the last 10 years, a volunteer crossing guard named Nathaniel Kendrick at Lakewood Elementary School in Dallas has made it his job to keep his community safe.
And now, his community is doing something for him.
The retiree, better known as Mr. Kent, had fallen on hard times while caring for his “very sick” wife, and recently had his car repossessed, according to a report from local TV station WFAA-8.
One day on the job, Kendrick noticed a car parked in the middle of the intersection. When he asked the group of parents around him to move the car, one of the dads gave Kendrick a touching reply: “Well it’s your car. Why don’t you move it?”
MORE: How a Dancing Crossing Guard Brings Smiles to a Healing Newtown
Kendrick initially couldn’t believe what he heard, but once he realized what had been done for him, he was immediately brought to tears. The crowd around him cheered and went in to embrace him.
The touching gesture was organized by Friends of Lakewood, a group of elementary school dads who help out with various school-related activities. Apparently, raising money for their beloved crossing guard’s new car only took a single week.
Watch the moving video below from USA Today.
DON’T MISS: This Inspiring Teen Took His Great-Grandmother to Prom
3D Printing Can Lift People Out of Poverty
With a little help from 3D printing, Madhu Viswanathan, a professor at the University of Illinois in Champaign, is teaching a new kind of innovation that could help disadvantaged students unleash their creativity and succeed in launching a business.
How does he do it? By combining the technology with marketplace literacy (one’s understanding of their place in a commercial trading system), Viswanathan is helping students visualize a product and actually print a prototype that could provide real insight into commercial development.
Viswanathan, who has taught business to some of the world’s poorest communities in places like India and Tanzania, and his colleagues have imported their international strategy to help America’s poor with business basics.
Ron Duncan, a teacher involved in the extension program, says that 3D printing has unlocked a new door to business opportunity for disadvantaged students in this country.
“The fact that it was prototyped in India and Africa means there are more opportunities in those places. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t people here who are analogues,” Duncan tells Fast Company. “These crippling elements that stop people from unleashing their creativity are present here as they are in any third-world country.”
Duncan uses four phases in his class: He asks students about what they value (a computer, a necklace, etc.), what and where they buy things, if they can view those places from a retailer’s standpoint and finally, what product they would like to create. While these are fundamental questions in Business 101, Duncan says that it’s important to see commercial relationships from all angles before focusing on product prototyping.
His students have created everything from a personalized license plate holder to a seat-belt clip that lets you release yourself in an emergency. Duncan has taught about 250 students, but is aiming to expand the international-turned-local strategy.
“It’s a human nature kind of thing. When people have a lot of economic stress, their capacity to think is greatly hindered. That’s the same in a lot of places. This project addresses that,” Duncan adds.
MORE: Two Keys to the Future: 3-D Printing and Employed Veterans
The Unlikely Partnership That’s Helping the Poor
When low-income patients end up in the hospital with a medical emergency, it might not only be doctors, but also lawyers who save their lives.
Many medical facilities now have onsite attorneys offering free legal aid to such patients. This service makes sense, since issues such as eviction, homelessness and difficulty attaining services for a disabled or developmentally delayed child can negatively impact a patient’s health.
This model of partnership between the medical and legal professions began in Boston in 1993, and since then, it’s expanded to 260 locations in 38 states, according to NBC News.
The Cox family of Cleveland is an example of how these programs are effective. Tony Cox had a heart attack when he fell off a ladder during a roofing job. Out of work, he fell behind on his mortgage payments, and his family was on the verge of eviction when a legal services attorney stepped in and worked with the bank to renegotiate their loan. “We were getting ready to be homeless, to move in with family,” Donna, his wife, says. “We would have been separated.”
Colleen Cotter, director of Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, tells NBC News, “When we really look at the issues in our clients’ lives, there’s almost always a health issue involved. Poverty is unhealthy, and bad health can lead to economic chaos. I see everything we do as increasing the health and communities we serve.”
Pediatrician Robert Needleman of Case Western University Medical School says, “In general, medicine does not spend much time on the parts of patients’ lives that we can’t fix.” Needleman is striving to change that, however, by instructing medical students to chat with patients about stressors in their lives and issuing referrals to free legal aid when appropriate.
Not only do these partnerships between lawyers and doctors save people from eviction and bring about other positive changes in their lives, but they also save money. In Pennsylvania, Lancaster General Hospital established a clinic for “super-utilizers” (i.e. people who come to the emergency room frequently). When they added a lawyer to the services the facility offered, the patients’ use of the health care system declined by half.
As Megan Sprecher, a Legal Aid Society of Cleveland attorney says about one client she helped avoid homelessness by obtaining a tax refund that had been lost in the mail, “It was a very simple issue, but these systems can be hard to navigate if you’re not familiar with them.”
MORE: When it Comes to Helping Homeless Vets, Could Thinking Small be the Answer?
The Cross-Country Road Trip with Stops to Volunteer Along the Way
Bland Hoke was planning a road trip from New York to his new home in Wyoming. But rather than stopping along the way to check out tourist spots and famous landmarks, the designer enlisted two friends to help him create urban workshops to innovate solutions to local problems.
With the help of filmmaker William Novak and the anonymous artist behind the Rotten Apple hacking project, Hoke documented what he accomplished along the way in a film called “Drive.”
“We looked for groups who are working on ways to improve urban environments, and decided to try to work with them on really short creative projects,” Hoke tells Fast Company. “We reached out to people in different cities and tried to more or less chart a line that went from New York to Wyoming.”
To mark the beginning of the journey, Hoke and his two friends began in New York City, working with hacktivists at Learn Do Share to transform old bike racks into chairs as well as fire hydrants into chess games on the street.
As they headed west, the three stopped in Detroit where they coordinated a project with Sit On It Detroit, a local grassroots group that outfits bus stops with built-in mini libraries.
“We helped them come up with a new bench,” Hoke says. “They told us they started with nothing, no design background, just high school shop class. We helped push the project a little bit further.”
While in the Midwest, Hoke breezed through Chicago and met up with Cooperation Operation, a nonprofit that turns vacant land into educational and empowerment projects, to help create a community posting board out of scraps that had been thrown away. The group also worked their way through Milwaukee, as well as an impromptu stop in Omaha to help kids on an art project.
“Sometimes you can plan these journeys, and take a bunch of time and try to make it perfect, but sometimes serendipity is the best thing,” he says.
Hoke partially funded the project through a Kickstarter project initially intended for Softwalks, an urban intervention for construction sites. Due to city regulation and permit challenges, Softwalks was unable to launch successfully, which is why Hoke used the funding for “Drive” instead.
“I could have just packed up the car, drove, and got to where I was going,” Hoke explains. “But we had the chance to do a creative project. I think it’s wonderful to travel across the country and find like-minded people who are working on really interesting projects.”
Hopefully “Drive” will inspire more Americans to take on a more creative way of road-tripping.
MORE: 7 Key Drivers to Turn Social Innovation into Success
The Number of Utah Residents Suffering From Mental Illness is Staggering. What Is the State Doing to Help?
The statistics about mental health in Utah are shocking: 22.3 percent of the adult population in the state report experience with a mental illness, and the depression and suicide rates tower over the already-frightening national averages.
This data is the sole inspiration behind Ginger.io’s collaboration with the Association for Utah Community Health (with grant-funding from Cambia Health Foundation) to produce the app, Utah SmartCare.
The app offers questionnaires to gauge the mental state of 500 patients in-between therapy sessions (most of whom suffer from comorbid mental and physical illnesses and 80 percent of whom live at or below the poverty line) — something that is turning out to be an effective means of patient care. “This will enable us to respond more quickly and avoid more complex interventions,” says Juergen Korbanka, executive director of Wasatch Mental Health in Utah, in an interview with Inquisitr.
Additionally, the app tracks user’s movements, who he or she talks to on the phone, how much he or she slept and any other apps being used. This information, paired with the answers to questionnaires, can help draw correlations and will “allow us to better assess how our clients are doing between appointments and catch any potential problems earlier, leading to better clinical outcomes,” says Brandon Hatch, executive director of Davis Behavioral Health.
By creating an algorithm for each patient, Utah SmartCare will be able to report to mental health professionals if a user’s mental state declines between sessions. “Up until this point, we haven’t had the technology to effectively measure how patients are feeling outside of a care setting,” says cofounder and CEO of Ginger.io, Dr. Anmol Madon.
MORE: If Pharmacies Are Closed, This App Helps Diabetes Locate Much-Needed Medication
How to Bridge the Digital Divide
While many claim that devices are causing people to interact less, here’s a great example of technology bringing people together.
Once a week, 16-year-old Mikinly Sullivan travels to the Frasier Meadows retirement home in Boulder, Colo., to visit her friend, 89-year-old Kevin Bunnell. The two were connected through Cyber Seniors, a program that pairs high school volunteers with elderly individuals that need help navigating new-fangled technology.
The program wants to ensure that seniors are learning to use computers — not just letting the young people figure things out for them — so as a rule, the elder person’s fingers must be on the keyboard the whole time, while the teenager coaches them through maneuvers.
Bunnell is a poet, and Sullivan has been helping him organize the many poems he’s written over his lifetime. “I love listening to the stories from when he was young,” Sullivan says to PBS News Hour. In exchange, Bunnell wrote a poem in honor of the Cyber Seniors program.
Another senior benefitting from the program is Bruce Mackenzie. “I’m taking a class at the university called Hip-Hop 101,” he says, “And I didn’t know how to listen to the rap songs that are on hip-hop. And Ryan [a teen participant] showed me how to go to YouTube, which I never knew anything about. So I go to YouTube now and I can listen to all these rap songs for my class.”
While the program’s ultimate mission is to help seniors get online, Jack Williamson, who runs Cyber Seniors, says that it “helps build relationships between young people and seniors, which is rare in this culture today.”
As one student volunteer tells PBS News Hour, “I’m learning a lot from them and they’re learning from me. I have actually found through this that I think I like older people more than I like younger people.”
MORE: When The Elderly Need Help With Chores, This Concierge Service Does the Heavy Lifting
The 10 Most Inspiring Books of 2014
In a year where our country witnessed a widening gap between rich and poor, a toxic chemical leak, long delays for veterans at hospitals and clinics, botched lethal injections, racially-charged protests, record low voter turnout and stunning Congressional dysfunction, we at NationSwell turned to these ten books for stories of hope. Confronted by complex issues, these authors never flinched. Instead, they brought us creative solutions and unwavering heroics. Read on for our top ten books of 2014 (alphabetized by author):
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
Are there any inspiring books we missed? Let us know in the comments below.
America’s 10 Best Bike Lanes
It was just seven short years ago that that New York City created the United States’s first protected bike lane. Since them, as part of an effort to get more cyclists on the road, more communities across the country have embraced safer bike lanes.
Currently, there are 183 projects throughout the U.S., according to PeopleForBikes, an advocacy group based in Colorado. The organization recently mapped out the best projects and designs cropping up; as protected bike lanes become the norm, smaller cities should take note of these standout designs.
“Last year there were only a handful of cities building protected bike lanes. It was really the cool cities — the innovative, creative leaders,”says Martha Roskowski, head of the Green Lane Project program. “Now, we’re seeing a lot of other cities are getting on-board and implementing them.”
Among the top is San Francisco’s Polk Street, which is distinguished by its separation from cars and opposite flow of traffic, according to Martha Roskowski, who heads PeopleForBike’s Green Lane Project program.
Here are the top 10 projects, according to PeopleForBikes:
- Polk Street, San Francisco
- 2nd Avenue, Seattle
- Riverside Drive, Memphis, Tenn.
- Rosemead Boulevard, Temple City, Calif.
- Furness Drive, Austin, Texas
- Broadway, Seattle
- SW Multnomah Boulevard, Portland, Ore.
- Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh
- King Street, Honolulu
- Broadway, Chicago
While many Dutch and European bike lanes are uniform design, Roskowski notes that American projects have taken on distinct characteristics based on each city. Chicago and Seattle have prioritized low-cost strategies, while San Francisco bike lanes are focused more on aesthetic. But each design has its benefits. For example, the cheaper model, she adds, helps cities get more residents to adapt the model.
“As you get more people riding, it builds support to go back and do more robust facilities,” Roskowski tells Fast Company. “The big jump in ridership happens when you really make those connections — point A to point B — and people can get where they want to go.”