Gozio aims to help hospitals connect with patients and staff

Gozio began by helping patients navigate the healthcare experience, but now the digital health company is also moving in different directions.

While still focused on patients, Gozio has expanded its platform to offer custom experiences for different groups. With Gozio’s platform, hospitals and health systems could design mobile experiences aimed at cardiology or specifically at women having babies, tailoring offerings for them and excluding information that’s not relevant.

Gozio is also offering solutions for hospitals to offer better mobile experiences for staff. With Gozio’s platform, health systems could offer employees resources to answer questions and provide assistance with onboarding or training. Gozio has partnered with UNC Health for the staffing platform.

“We’re really excited about what we’re doing this year, around opening up our platform for engaging staff at hospital systems,” says Joshua Titus, CEO of Gozio.

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The platform also allows opportunities for staff to connect with patients and visitors. Patients can offer thanks for their care, which in turn could help staff to be a bit more encouraged. The digital tools can also make it easier for health systems to recognize and reward employees.

In an interview with Chief Healthcare Executive®, Titus is optimistic that making it easier for healthcare workers to get encouragement or recognition could play a role in reducing burnout.

“I'd love to be able to help even just a little bit in that space,” he says. “I think getting that feedback and accolades, to have the patients or visitors have the ability to easily give their care team kudos, I think will go a little bit towards helping.”

Health systems continue to struggle to retain doctors, nurses and other key employees. While Gozio says hospital and healthcare executives continue to be focused on the patient experience, he says he’s heard from more leaders about their difficulties with staff retention. He says leaders are telling him staff retention “is the thing that keeps us up at night.”

“It really is front of mind right now,” Titus says.

He adds that the staff resources that can be easily accessed could help reduce staff burnout, which hospital leaders acknowledge is a persistent problem.

“These are the caregivers. These are the ones who dedicated their lives to helping people,” Titus says. “If we can help make their lives better, and therefore the patient's lives better, and make our health system partners more successful, it's a great place to be.”

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Gozio is partnering with a number of health systems on its patient engagement platforms, including Novant Health, Grady, Yale New Haven Health, Piedmont Healthcare, UT Southwestern Medical Center and a host of others.

Initially, Gozio began by helping patients and visitors find their way around the health system, including navigating parking and getting to specific departments. Eventually, Gozio expanded to other patient engagement offerings, including scheduling appointments and paying bills.

Gozio says the move to offer custom experience and staff resources was driven by conversations with their clients. And in those discussions, he says the company gains perspective on how to solve problems.

“This is not genius on our part,” he says. “This is simply us sitting down with our clients, sometimes over a beer and going, ‘What is going on?’”

Titus says the ability to create a custom experience offers added value for health systems, and for patients.

“If you're an oncology patient, you select an oncology experience, the same exact app, and the platform that you're using has different things available to you, that may be very specific to an oncology experience,” Titus says. “You can imagine if you're (looking for) labor and delivery, it's going to be very different.”

He says the ability to create custom experiences could be an asset for hospitals looking to become the preferred provider for large employers.

Over the past year, Gozio has been adding staff as the company works with more healthcare clients.

“The growth has been phenomenal,” Titus says. We’ve essentially doubled over the past 12 months. We’re just swimming as hard as we can.”

Titus says he relishes working with health systems to solve problems.

“Honestly, that's the fun part of my job,” he says.