Portable panic buttons aim to alleviate violence against healthcare workers

Many hospitals have panic buttons—on walls, under desks, maybe even on an app. The problem? If you’re actively being attacked, you probably can’t reach it.

This is where small, portable buttons from companies like Cognosos, Silent Beacon, or Roar for Good come in. Because, unfortunately, odds are, someone in your healthcare facility will be attacked.

A survey by nurse’s union National Nurses United found that about 80% of 914 nurses reported they had experienced some form of verbal or physical violence on the job in 2023. In 2021 and 2022, the healthcare and social services sectors accounted for 72.8% of over 40,000 workplace violence cases in private industry that required workers to take time off, change duties, or transfer to another role, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“It’s a shame that violence is seen as part of the job,” Yasmine Mustafa, co-founder and CEO of Roar, told Healthcare Brew. “It shouldn’t be this way.”

The deets

Roar, a Philadelphia-based, women-led startup addressing workplace safety, designed a wearable panic button small enough to be worn alongside a worker’s badge. Clicking the button sends an instant alert with the worker’s real-time location to management or security, and logs incident data for future reference.

The goal of Roar’s system, Mustafa said, is “to only do one thing and do it really, really, really well.”

This means getting deep into the nitty-gritty of design by putting in “redundancy on top of redundancy.”

Clients include Tennessee-based Acadia Healthcare, Ellie Mental Health, Start Treatment and Recovery Centers, Wisconsin-based Beloit Health System, and the Philadelphia-based Behavioral Wellness Center at Girard (BeWell).

Numbers suggest the product works. A 2022 case study at BeWell found that the system reduced incidents between patients and staff by 39% during a three-month pilot, and workers’ compensation claims decreased by 24% in less than six months.

Show me the money

Of course, hospitals don’t run on good intentions—they run on budgets. And when it comes to safety tech, the first question from leadership isn’t always “Will this protect our staff?” but “How much is this going to cost us?”

A 100-room, 100-staff facility will typically pay between $10k and $12k for Roar’s one-time hardware, installation, and training costs, then between $5k and $10k in annual costs depending on whether they add the emergency response feature that instantly calls 911, Mustafa said.

This pales in comparison to the average cost of nonfatal workplace violence, with estimates for incidents affecting nurses ranging from $109,000 to over $330,000 a year for one system, a 2022 review in the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety found.

Mustafa puts her money where her mouth is, surveying staff before and after implementation. If at least half of the staff doesn’t feel safer in 90 days or workers’ comp claims don’t drop by 20% in a year, clients can opt out of their contracts, she said.

‘Part of the job’

But solving nurse workplace violence is far from a one-click fix.

Wearable panic buttons can help nurses feel safer, but they don’t work to prevent violence the same way measures like de-escalation training or legislation do, Ryan Oglesby, president of the Emergency Nurses Association professional group, told Healthcare Brew.

The problem is systemic. Some workers, supervisors, and law enforcement believe that violent backlash from patients is “part of the job,” he said.

When violence happens, it often isn’t even reported: An often-cited study in the journal Workplace Health and Safety surveyed 2,010 hospital workers in 2013 and found that of the 275 who experienced workplace violence, only 12% formally documented the incident and just over 45% reported it informally, like telling their supervisors.

“We can provide every nurse and healthcare provider with a panic button, but if we don’t have something that’s going to prevent that assailant from hurting someone again, then we really are kind of back to square one,” Oglesby said.