CalmWave Announces $4 Million to Reduce Nurse Burnout and Alarm Fatigue

CalmWave harnesses the power of AI to analyze the health of a hospital's operations to improve nurse retention and patient outcomes.

SEATTLE, Nov. 15, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CalmWave – the company leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to bring operational health to hospitals – today announced the close of its oversubscribed $4 million seed round led by Bonfire Ventures with participation from Tau Ventures, AI2 Incubator, Seachange Ventures, Hike Ventures, and the co-founders of PagerDuty. CalmWave uses AI to gauge hospitals' Operations Health to improve nurse retention and patient outcomes by reducing alarm fatigue in intensive care units (ICUs).

"As the largest segment of the healthcare workforce, nurses are dramatically affected by false alarms and ICU noise. Nearly 50% of nurses report suffering from burnout," said CalmWave CEO and Founder Ophir Ronen. "We envision a day where Operations Health is the definitive measure of performance for healthcare providers. We aim to provide an objective, repeatable, and comprehensive AI-powered analytical scoring system to improve hospital operations – starting with alarms – and improve the lives of patients, their caregivers, and providers."

Nearly 80% of alarms in ICUs are false positives. Combined with 12-hour work shifts, unbalanced nurse-to-patient ratios, and COVID-19's pressure on an already stressed healthcare system, nurses are nearly guaranteed to experience alarm fatigue and overall workplace exhaustion.

CalmWave's platform uses AI and expert services to help healthcare organizations optimize operations and make data-informed decisions. Utilizing a healthcare organization's data, CalmWave transparently empowers leadership to manage staff more efficiently, reduce turnover rates, and improve patient outcomes.

"As a practicing nurse, I've experienced the pressures and noise of working in the hospital. Alarm fatigue has become a hazard of the job, but it doesn't have to be," said Rachel Alesi, a nurse working at a major University Research Medical Center on the West Coast. "As hospitals struggle to respond and improve working conditions, CalmWave's platform fills that gap by providing actionable insights and direct engagement to improve care and help hospital staff."

"Nurses are leaving our healthcare system in droves—a critical problem for all of us—and alarm fatigue is a significant contributor to burnout. Nurses get triggered by small things like their microwave going off at home, and we can all do better. CalmWave is a major step forward," said Dr. Nick Mark at Swedish Hospital.

CalmWave's platform ingests data from all devices a patient is connected to and delivers customizable views for every clinician on the floor: individual patient views, summary views of patients across the ward, views of clustered patient alarms (incidents), and more. Calmwave "Operations Health Scores" describe each nurse's workload and well-being based on factors such as alarm volume, response times, patient length of stay, and nurse-to-patient ratio.

Additional CalmWave platform features include:

• Smart Alarms to intelligently group alarms into "incidents" based on alert buffering, false alarm probability indicators, added inputs for medications, and early warning indicators
• Device Thresholds customized to each patient's physiology & Alarm Monitoring to optimize devices for alarm reduction
• Intelligent Patient Acuity to provide a comprehensive score of each patient's condition based on real-time insights
• Staff Orchestration to optimize staff workloads based on patient acuity and alarm volume and to update scheduling for improved staff retention
• Insights & Analytics to host all users – nurses, managers, administrators, IT, and executives – within an easy-to-navigate command center
• Expert Services engagements built into the platform to provide assessment, training, consultation, and implementation

"Going from inception to seed funding in just five months is no small feat and is a testament to CalmWave's potential," said Bryan Hale at the AI2 Incubator. "CalmWave is a leading example of AI's power to implement positive change that will improve people's lives and in one of the most important industries serving communities and people across the world."

CalmWave is the fastest company to go from inception to funding at the AI2 Incubator, a pre-seed startup incubator partnered with the Allen Institute for AI. The impressive funding indicates that investors understand the critical, unmet need that CalmWave is addressing within the healthcare industry.

"With CalmWave, healthcare organizations now have the technology they need to prioritize staff wellbeing and retention by significantly reducing alarm fatigue," said Mark Mullen, co-founder at Bonfire Ventures. "CalmWave enables a future where unnecessary noise and alerts and their effects on staff and patient stress are the exceptions, not the rule.

CalmWave will leverage the funding for recruiting top talent, new marketing initiatives and continuing to create and launch innovative products to bring operations health to health care. To learn more about CalmWave, please visit https://calmwave.ai/.

CalmWave's primary objective is to support nurses and provide a crucial solution to their noisy and chaotic environments. The platform remediates alarm fatigue, improves staff retention, and transforms operations health through data science and AI. CalmWave takes inspiration from hard-won lessons learned in Enterprise IT to help the healthcare industry improve talent retention, reduce burnout and improve patient outcomes. CalmWave recently closed a $4M seed round and is on track to solve the healthcare industry's most significant pain points.

SOURCE CalmWave