The bereavement care tech platform Grief Coach has rebranded as Help Texts and is expanding its services to include support for health care workers who are contending with stress or burnout.
Help Texts offers a mobile service that sends advice and supportive messages via text to bereaved individuals and, as of late December, health care employees. The company convened a group of professionals from a variety of disciplines with experience in grief care to develop the content.
“We’d always intended to launch support for people after a terminal diagnosis. But last year, all of our clients, every hospice client and tissue bank, was struggling with staffing, burnout and shortages,” Emma Payne, Help Texts founder and CEO, told Hospice News. “So it also became really clear that we could use our existing platform to provide support around burnout and resilience as well. So we decided to do both, and that meant that Grief Coach as a name really no longer applied.”
Payne founded the company in 2018 after selling her house for startup capital. She previously worked for more than two decades building web and mobile solutions for a variety of purposes, including suicide prevention, crisis intervention and youth voter engagement. For the past 10 years, she also has done volunteer work in grief and loss crisis intervention.
Help Texts recently secured $500,000 in a funding round, led primarily by angel investors.
Help TextsThe startup’s business model includes partnerships with hospices. Operators can purchase 13-month subscriptions and offer families access. The 13-month timeframe corresponds with the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) requirement that hospices provide bereavement care for 13 months following a patient’s death.
Help Texts has been on a consistent growth trajectory, Payne told Hospice News.
“I’m most proud of our community of experts, and I think that that’s in large part the reason that we’ve grown the way we have — in a very genuine way by actually becoming part of the community, knowing that people who are really driving the research are on the front lines of what’s happening in bereavement,” Payne said. “The team itself is not necessarily that much bigger, but our impact is growing. The number of texts we send every day is growing, and the number of people who are talking about our work is growing.”
Help Texts is part of a growing movement towards tech-enabled grief care that has emerged in the past few years. A small but expanding cadre of startups has been developing apps to help the bereaved cope with the emotional toll and logistical challenges that come with a loved one’s death, offering the services in partnership with health care organizations, employers or direct-to-consumers.
The company is launching its new service amid an industry-wide labor shortage in health care. The longstanding problem, exacerbated during the pandemic, is arguably the industry’s most dangerous headwind. Though some stakeholders say they’ve seen signs of recovery, turnover spiked during the early years of COVID and the pool of available candidates seemed to be drying up.
Turnover among registered nurses, for example, reached 25.15% during 2022, according to the 2022-2023 Hospice Salary & Benefits Report, published by Hospital & Healthcare Compensation Service (HCS) in cooperation with the National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC).
Turnover rates among aides and CNAs were as high as 19.05% and 29.84%, respectively. Only LPNs and LVNs had higher rates, reaching 31.52% turnover and 25.12% for vacancies, the report indicated.
Symmetries exist between the grief experience and the strain of burnout among clinicians, particularly when it comes to marshaling the time and energy to seek resources, according to Payne.
“When you think about nurses and bereavement coordinators and clinicians facing burnout and just struggling at work, it’s sort of the same as when we’re grieving,” Payne said. “We can’t take in huge amounts of information. We can’t even read a whole book. But we do have time to receive texts each week that give us really practical tips and suggestions. We believe that what worked for grief will also be a helpful tool in other ways for people who are overwhelmed and need support.”
