Interview with Canopy CEO Shan Sinha

Shan Sinha is confronting the urgent issue of workplace violence in healthcare. Delving into the alarming rise of aggression against healthcare workers, particularly exacerbated by the pandemic, Shan discusses pioneering solutions like Canopy's wearable safety buttons that empower staff with connectivity and protection. 

Shan shares his extraordinary journey through the fast-paced world of technology and innovation. We embark on a captivating exploration of Shan's upbringing in Texas, his academic pursuit at MIT during the pivotal shift from Microsoft's reign to Google's ascension, and his leap into the startup ecosystem influenced by the dot-com boom. Shan's experiences highlight the challenges and triumphs faced by children of immigrants, shedding light on their vital contributions to technological advancement and healthcare innovation.

We trace the transformative evolution of cloud-based collaboration tools, punctuated by the early dominance of Amazon S3 and the emergence of Dropbox and Box. Shan recounts his bold decision to leave Microsoft, paving the way for his startup's critical role in shaping Google Drive, and reflects on Google's prescient embrace of hybrid work and video conferencing well before the pandemic. The journey through Shan's entrepreneurial ventures culminates in a successful acquisition by Dialpad, underscoring the dynamic interplay between technological growth and societal demands.

This episode challenges us to rethink how we safeguard our essential healthcare workers, drawing insights from Numbers on't Lie, by Vaclav Smil. It's a thought-provoking book on exponential growth and innovation that offers hope for addressing today's pressing issues, from energy to food waste. 

As of March 2025 HealthBiz is part of CareTalk. Healthcare. Unfiltered and can be found at the following links:

• Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2GTYhbNnvDHriDp7Xo9s6Z
• Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/caretalk-healthcare-unfiltered/id1532402352
• YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@CareTalkPodcast
• CareTalk website https://www.caretalkpodcast.com/

Host David E. Williams is president of healthcare strategy consulting firm Health Business Group.

Episodes through March 2025 were produced by Dafna Williams.

Transcript

0:00:01 - David Williams
Forty percent of healthcare workers have experienced workplace violence. Healthcare and social services are the source of nearly 75% of the incidents, and the situation is getting worse. What can hospitals and home care providers do to protect their workers and give them peace of mind? Hi everyone, I'm David Williams, president of Strategy Consulting Firm Health Business Group and host of the Health Biz Podcast, where I interview top healthcare leaders about their lives and careers. My guest today is Shan Sinha, ceo of Canopy, which provides an alerting system to protect healthcare staff from physical and verbal assaults. Do you like the show? If so, please subscribe and leave a review. Shan, welcome to the Health Biz Podcast. 

0:00:54 - Shan Sinha
Happy to be here. Thanks a lot for having me on, David. 

0:00:57 - David Williams
We're going to talk about Canopy in a few minutes, but I want to work up to that by asking you a bit about your background, your upbringing. What was your childhood like? Any childhood influences that have stuck with you? 

0:01:08 - Shan Sinha
Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess lay me down on the couch. There's probably a lot of different influences I think you could probably point to. I mean, I think you know, if I go all the way back, I'm the son of a couple of immigrants. I'm the son of a couple of immigrants. I was one of two siblings that they had. They moved here from India in their early 20s. My parents ended up living in New York for a little bit where my dad was working at IBM at the time. My mom was in the home for the most part Ended up moving to Texas, which is where I grew up for the most part. 

Ended up moving to Texas, which is where I grew up and ended up, you know, like a lot of kind of technologists that you probably spent time. You know spent a lot of their time focused on math and sciences and all that kind of stuff, Ended up getting the good fortune to get admitted to MIT going through high school. And, you know, I think what I'd probably say is I grew up in a time where Microsoft, like when I was a kid, Microsoft was the hot company. Yeah, I was, as I was getting from high school into college. I think there was this sort of transition happening between Microsoft being the company that everybody paid attention to, google becoming the company that everybody paid attention to. What I'd say is you know, it's amazing to think about, you know, those companies that just started and turned into what they did, and that's kind of where I got hooked on this idea of starting a company. I ended up trying to start IT services companies in high school, things like that, but then got to college and it was the heyday of the dot-com boom and so you know, when I sort of think back to kind of what really you know sort of shaped and steered me, I would say it was really the emergence of Microsoft. That was kind of a big thing. 

My dad went through kind of the IBM to Microsoft transition and I think it was negatively affected by that. I ended up going through that transition from Microsoft to Google kind of in you know sort of my late teens and early 20s, right in the middle of the dot-com heyday. And it was when I got to college where you know you had friends dropping out of college, which I ended up doing to go pursue startup dreams and things like that. That became a normal thing and my first startup company. I joined my freshman year of college and I think that was the first time I'd really been exposed to the idea of starting a company. And, long story short, I think it was just sort of hooked on that experience of creating something brand new, bringing it into existence, willing it into existence. That really has stuck with me for the rest of my career, and now my career is almost exclusively surrounded by the startup ecosystem. I had the good fortune of getting a chance to work at Microsoft and at. 

Google, but at the super highest level, I think, really just getting attracted and hooked to that idea of creating companies and helping to grow and scale them. That's kind of really what my entire career has been about. 

0:04:14 - David Williams
Nice, I was going to say. Looking back, it's either a good way that you've compartmentalized and rationalized what you were doing earlier on, or terrific foreshadowing in terms of Microsoft and Google, since you work. 

0:04:26 - Shan Sinha
There was. There was definitely no, no deliberate, like there was no deliberate plan involved there. I can tell you that that's all accidental. 

0:04:33 - David Williams
Yeah, now it's nice. Also, you know, I interview a lot of a lot of immigrants on the show. That's a lot of innovators in the healthcare economy and the other parts of the economy in this country. But one of the things of course you know, Indian parents would be very any parents, but immigrant parents in particular be very excited to tell all their friends when their son got into MIT and maybe slightly less excited to say they didn't finish. 

0:05:00 - Shan Sinha
Yeah, I mean. The good news is I did eventually finish, but what I can tell you is, for the few years that I was dropped out, there was really one question that was being asked to me, if not every day, every multiple, every multiple times a day, it was. So are you going back to college? 

0:05:18 - David Williams
When are you going to? 

0:05:18 - Shan Sinha
college. How about now? I have another friend who started a company, multiple companies, and has had multiple, you know billion dollar outcomes and he ended up dropping out of the PhD program to go start his companies. He's also has Indian parents and his parents are still kind of wondering when he's going to finish his PhD for the fact that he's now created you know 30 billion dollars of value in the different companies that he's created. But you know, for some reason there's a unique requirement to kind of really focus on school. 

0:05:50 - David Williams
Good. Well, if we do another, you know, if I do another podcast and we more sort of put you on the couch, we can talk about all those elements and probably have enough to bring some alumni of the show back to discuss it. Nonetheless, some good successes. So let's talk a little bit about some of those things that you did and I'm interested in, and you mentioned Microsoft and then you mentioned a startup. If I understood correctly, you had a startup that was kind of a documents cloud documents company that was acquired by Google and became Google Drive. Is that overstating it? 

0:06:23 - Shan Sinha
No, that's accurate, we created. So I was at Microsoft in the early 2000s where I was working on a number of their enterprise technologies that included a lot of their collaboration efforts around SQL Server. At the time there was a project called WinFS. That was very, very influential. I ended up leaving to start a company. This was right in the wake of Amazon S3, emerging Amazon Web Services, things like that. So it sort of spawned a whole generation of collaboration companies. And Google Spreadsheets came out of a number of startup companies that were right around that generation that were trying to bring collaboration tools and office productivity tools into the cloud. This was sort of on the back of 10 years of Microsoft, you know, kind of really entering the enterprise with their Microsoft Office suites. And so, you know, early 2000s, fast forward to the early 2000s, you have a bunch of companies saying, oh look, the internet is really where all the attention is. How can you take these tools that we use every single day and bring them to the cloud? Well, at the same time, when S3 came out, that spawned a whole generation of tools like Dropbox and Box and Ignite, which is still not a public company, but all has been around for a while and is kind of a meaningful scale. Still not a public company, but all has been around for a while and is kind of a meaningful scale. 

We started a collaboration company very similarly, after seeing a lot of these trends, ended up leaving Microsoft with one of my coworkers and we ended up starting a company to enable collaboration around documents and specifically with a specific focus on collaborating on Microsoft Office and productivity documents. 

When we launched, we ended up getting a pretty healthy initial user base from the get-go. A few years in, google came along and said hey, look, this is a big area of focus for us. Why don't you come join us? We ended up agreeing that there was a big opportunity and, with a product that we created, essentially became the desktop part of the Google drive suite. So there was a number of tools like Google docs and Google spreadsheets, but the product that we made ultimately became Google drive and my team was responsible for that. I ended up running the Google enterprise business for a couple of years while I was there, but but that ended up becoming Google's kind of approach to bringing the desktop universe into the cloud universe. And now, if you look at 10 years later, sort of the interoperability that exists between Office documents and Google Docs and the Google apps productivity apps. A lot of that essentially started about 15 years ago when our team was brought in. 

0:09:07 - David Williams
Okay, terrific. And then I think, after Google, there was another company before Canopy, hi5. Is that right? Yeah, what was that? 

0:09:16 - Shan Sinha
Yeah. So, following that same trend of being able to see a glimpse of the future from inside companies like Microsoft and Google, the few years that I spent at Google were just. I mean, you just met wonderful people, amazing people, many of whom I still work with today. But one of the things that we really got a glimpse of at Google was a culture that you know, honestly, it was probably 12 years ahead of its time. We all know this now as a hybrid workforce, where sometimes they're going to be working from home, sometimes they're going to be working in the office. 

Well, one of the decisions that Google made in the late right as I got to Google so this is around 2010. 

So now think 14 years ago, a full 10 years before the pandemic, you know, nine to 10 years before the pandemic Google had basically decided that they were going to make the most significant investment in video conferencing technology, conferencing as a primary way of interacting with folks and I ended up, you know, kind of really coming away with a whole bunch of interesting experiences where you know you would know people and work with them and feel very close to them you know, having worked with them for a year, but you never met them in person and that was kind of the power of video, and we said you know what this is what the future of work is really going to look like. 

And so we decided to leave Google and start an enterprise video conferencing company something that Google was not going to do at the time and it ended up becoming a combination hardware software video conferencing solution that was designed for the hybrid workforce. We didn't have that term hybrid workforce at the time, but it was certainly what it was about. It was about hardware that you could install in your offices. It was about software that you could use from your desktops and it would allow anybody to connect over video wherever you were. 

Company did well. We ended up growing. I had thousands of customers, but it happened to be a part of the same cohort of companies in which Zoom came out Clearly. Zoom really won that market. 

We did. Okay. We ended up selling eventually the company to Dialpad, which is still a private company now but doing exceedingly well, and we're part of their video stack and our technology got wired into their video stack and so that ended up being sort of startup number two. Again, it came out of the experience and sort of that glimpse of the future that we saw at Google Fast forward. You know, 10 years, you know, I think this is the world we live in. Yet you know, a lot of those puzzle pieces still remain, I think an opportunity to solve. I think we still haven't nailed it quite yet. 

0:11:57 - David Williams
I remember. You know it's interesting to see when you have the confluence of the technology and the societal or business or economic needs that are there. And that's often they say. You know why Bill Gates did so well, you know, during his time it was the right time when PCs were coming and you had all the different pieces that kind of came together there. On the video conference side, I remember in the 90s when I was at Boston Consulting Group working on some things related to video conferencing and there the value proposition was it was not about hybrid work or work from home or anything about that. It was about is that you could reduce and make that a video conference instead of, you know, an in-person meeting. And that was what the times were like and that's what the technology was like at that time. We've been too heavy to do for, you know, still required setup and still required an office. You wouldn't have been able to do it from home. So it's interesting how that came about that was. 

0:12:44 - Shan Sinha
It's interesting because that was the exact insight you know, kind of in the early 2010s call it 2010, 2011, 2012,. That, I think you know, sort of led to the new wave of video conferencing before it turned in. You know what it was and this is what Google was actually doing. They had started investing in their own homegrown technology to deal with this, but they had decided to take those big executive level video conferencing solutions that were designed again to mitigate travel, like you were describing among executives. Video conferencing solutions that were designed again to mitigate travel, like you were describing among executives half a million dollars, a million dollars per installation, and the goal was to commercialize that and take every conversation instead of a conference call, turn that into a video call and you know what, fast forward, zoom us all that. 

I think we ended up pushing the state of the art forward and that's ultimately what the world ended up being. A video call is a normal thing for us to do now, and so much business gets done without actually having that in person. I think that started in 2010 in earnest and kind of really was accelerated by the pandemic, and I think that's one of the things that hasn't really gone away from the pandemic. So I think we were right on trend, right kind of at the right time with the intersection of some of the trends that were going on. But absolutely, I think you're exactly right. It's like everything else, everything is sort of incremental and builds on top of trends that have been going on for a while. 

0:13:57 - David Williams
So I love the idea of you know, the collaboration with the, you know Docverse and Google Drive and Hi5 with the bring the video conference together and that's sort of where the world is going. And I guess I have to say that leading up to Canopy it's a little disappointing, but then the next big thing that you saw is, you know, health violence in the health care workplace, but nonetheless that's what you're going after. So where did you, you know, where did this idea, this opportunity, come from? 

0:14:24 - Shan Sinha
Yeah it. So five years ago was the first time I'd really intersected with healthcare or technology for healthcare, and you know I was on a break, we were, you know we just we just sold High Five and I was hanging around. I don't know if I was actually planning on working again. I was kind of flirting with just kind of becoming an investor maybe, which is something that I've been doing for the last decade as well, which is, I think, the typical pattern that I think founders kind of tend to go through. You know, might have had a little bit of good fortune, but you know, one of the things that we saw happening five years ago was really the emergence of sensors and computing everywhere, and so we were kind of playing around with, you know, things that you could do with really small things and small computing form factors, and a common friend introduced us to a few former hospital career hospital execs, the former CEOs, former senior executives between them and a leading academic health system on the East Coast. We ended up getting exposed to a problem that you know certainly nobody ever talks about, it's certainly underreported, but they were all concerned about the impact that it had to staff, staff satisfaction, staff wellness, long-term trends, like you know, their ability and their desire to stay in the profession, and we were, to be perfectly honest, we were surprised at how big of a problem this was. You know, again, child of immigrants, so I'm second generation. One of the three professions that you're supposed to essentially do is engineer, lawyer or doctor, and the idea that people would get aggressive with doctors and physicians and clinicians was just, I mean, it was hard to believe. And then we started looking into it and it turns out that the problems were real and what became obvious was that in the hospital universe you're not automatically seeking out technology solutions to problems that you might feel are just sort of yours to deal with at an operational level. From a technology point of view. We never knew this was a problem. As outsiders to healthcare, we would have never known that this is really an issue, but it turns out. 

The stats are staggering. You know 40% of staff will encounter some version of. Healthcare workers will encounter some version of of healthcare workers will encounter some version of assault or aggression directed towards them. We you know healthcare as an occupation, for you know, four, five times as likely to encounter some sort of incident of violence One of the kind of crazy anecdotes. That again, it just sort of stress. It just sort of stresses your sort of intuitive understanding of you know kind of what a hospital experience might look like. 

We had the head of an OBGYN unit where, you know, families were having babies, describe a need for protection from patient aggression, patient violence. We're like moms having babies, like how does that work? And you know, what they described to us was in a lot of communities and this is across all demographics, this is not restricted to any one socioeconomic group. In many communities, having a child triggers a whole bunch of dynamics and so the father of the baby might show up and all of a sudden get super aggressive and start punching out walls and things like that. 

So we kept hearing these types of anecdotes and realized how big of a problem this was and we started surveying and sort of you know informally talking to other senior execs. 

They all reiterated the same exact thing and said huge problem, it's affecting my staff. I hear about it all the time and at the end of the day, my staff are just encountering stresses due to patient aggression, patient violence, and we felt like, as technologists, there were lots of solutions that we could apply that might be able to help. That may not have been obvious to folks that you know were kind of just thinking about day-to-day operations, and it felt like it turned into a really great collaboration where you know we could bring together technologists, healthcare experts to go create a solution that could actually make a real impact. And over five years, I'm proud to say that we've really been able to accomplish a significant amount of impact, although it feels like we're still right at the beginning. We certainly have not made healthcare, you know, made violence and healthcare go away directed towards staff, but I think we're starting to make some real impact here. 

0:19:15 - David Williams
It may not be unique to healthcare I'm sure a lot of industries. Once you're in the inside, you see what occurs. But the sort of phenomenon that you're describing even though I think it's shocking to an outsider to think babies are being born, and yet that's where there's going to be violence the insiders know one of the reasons that they'll get the birth certificate set up and the signatures on the birth certificate right away is that the dad is likely to acknowledge it right at that moment and may not later. So that's why. That's why dads expect to sign the birth certificate there. 

0:19:41 - Shan Sinha
So that's, exactly right. 

0:19:42 - David Williams
Yeah, so things like that are. 

0:19:45 - Shan Sinha
And that's and that's. 

I mean, that's a really good example, david, of the kind of information that's really specific to a particular profession. 

But then oftentimes you know, particularly in the context of a problem like this, where you don't really want to advertise that there's a you know that, this, that you struggle with these types of challenges and you don't want to talk about it and as a result, it's underreported and in the worst cases, most healthcare staff and workers think this is just part of the job and that's kind of the saddest sort of state of the world here. 

And from a technologist point of view it's like, oh hey, you know what, there are problems that could be applied. So until you can actually bring some of those people in the room together, you know, that sort of light bulb moment of hey, like you can actually do something, maybe more than what you'd even contemplated doesn't really exist, and so you know, it just ended up being really lucky that we were able to intersect with some folks where we could kind of bring together multiple different perspectives, and I think that's been really core to our ability to create something meaningful and impactful on the organizations that we've been able to work with now, and now we're protecting, you know, nearly 200,000 people around the country, and we're seeing all kinds of positive impacts on not only just the staff but the actual organizations that they are a part of. 

0:21:00 - David Williams
Nice. So, before we talk about solutions, one more question about problems. So, covid, how did COVID impact this situation, which had been brewing for some time, if it had not come to light? 

0:21:13 - Shan Sinha
You know, as far as we can tell, it just made everything worse and it really you know, ultimately, that acceleration of violence perpetrated against staff didn't really recede post-COVID. We see in pockets maybe a little bit of improvement, but by and large, most of the numbers that we see in our system, I mean in the last 12 months alone, you know, across the 200,000 people we're protecting, we still see over 26,000 incidents that represent legitimate incidents where people needed help. Hopefully what we're seeing is a lower severity of incidents than what might have existed before, but that represents, you know, almost 15% of staff in any given year will encounter some sort of incident and the numbers are very, very staggering. And so you know, I think, what happened with COVID. Was it really intersected with a number of stressors on the system? 

I think, first of all, you're seeing, you know, lower staffing ratios, so there's more patients for each, you know, caregiver. You're seeing continued prevalence of opioid driven behavior. You're seeing a more polarized society. More polarized society. You're seeing, you know, protocols you know that showed up during the pandemic closed door protocols where you're having to take care of a patient behind a closed door. 

All of these things, I think, translate to, you know, a heightened state of you know, sort of being for everybody, particularly in your rawest, most emotional moments. So what are the real causes? I think nobody, nobody. You know it's hard rawest, most emotional moments. So what are the real causes? I think nobody, nobody, you know. It's hard to say because most of the leaders that we talk to, whenever we surveyed individuals and CEOs and kind of you know healthcare leaders, they would say you know what? This might just have been a problem that's been around forever. We're not paying attention to it, but it certainly feels like there's a number of things that have sort of exacerbated a lot of these stressors and it doesn't seem like it's going away anywhere anytime soon. 

0:23:15 - David Williams
One of the things that happens, I think, in healthcare. So there's, you have, in some cases someone will come to a healthcare facility with a specific intention to do harm and the means to do it and so on. There's some of that, but I think, more commonly, what happens you're describing closed door situation, raw emotions, things escalate and it's my understanding is that there's an opportunity perhaps to intervene early on, in that not too soon, but at the right time, and if you can do that, then that's kind of the core to addressing the problem. So I think, if I've understood that right, what is your approach? What's the system? How does it actually work? Can't be system. 

0:23:54 - Shan Sinha
Yeah, that's a great. I think that's a really important point because I think that's, you know, kind of ultimately the real opportunity from the perspective of, you know, organizations trying to deal with the crisis here. Trying to deal with the crisis here, you know, I think I was in a room recently with nearly a dozen healthcare CEOs and COO level this was just last week and what was really both saddening and sort of illuminating, I think, was every single leader in that room essentially raised their hand and said, yep, this is a huge problem for our organization, it's a priority, and our primary challenge is we just didn't know about the various, that there are different technologies like this, technologies like this, and every single one of them was investing sometimes in tools like metal detectors, you know, to deal with those premeditated types of situations. Every one of them was investing in de-escalation training, which was, you know, in our mind, an important you know tool intervention to bring into your organizations but still kind of places the onus on staff members to actually be able to do something when they're there to deliver care they're not trained to, you know, deal with conflict of this sorts. And so what we found is that hospitals tend to have lots of resources available that can support your staff whenever they encounter a situation like this, and one of the most you know kind of effective interventions that they can apply is to take all those resources and make them available to staff when they might need it and, in particular, as early as they begin to sense things starting to escalate. The earlier you can do that. You can try a different approach, try to you know kind of start to calm a situation down and lower the temperature. 

So the way that our technology works is pretty straightforward, which is we give individuals or we give organizations, essentially a wearable button that they can keep with them. That's individually assigned, that's assigned to them. They clip it onto their badge For the video viewers in your audience. I'll show you what it looks like. It's just a simple, thin, lightweight button. It has a long battery life so you never have to think about it. You don't have to charge it. It's seven years of battery life. 

You press that button and it instantly connects you to a whole range of different resources that the hospital might have that can help intervene. Number one is nearby co-workers. When they press that button, we can calculate who of your co-workers is nearby and could be in a position to step in and help. So let's say David needs assistance because a patient is starting to escalate. He can Press this button. 

Tara and Shan, who might be nearby, will get a notification that says David is requesting help in room 505. 

And Tara and Shan can step in and potentially sub in for you, offer a different perspective, a different voice and help hopefully lower the temperature down to a point where it is no longer a concern, a safety concern. 

At the same time, we'll connect you to central security so that they can help. We can connect you to a dedicated team that is designed to support patient intervention in situations like this. Like, let's say, you're in a behavioral health unit, you have a dedicated behavioral health response team. And then, for those locations where you might not be within access of security, we can also help you connect to law enforcement local law enforcement through a 911 call who might be able to dispatch somebody to come and help, depending on what sort of environment you're in. Bottom line is there's a single button that can be used to signal for help. That helps bring any resources that a hospital might have in place and in doing so, staff tend to feel more supported. It's a less lonely experience. You know you have an instant connection. It's discrete and it ultimately complements a lot of those interventions that health systems are investing in, like de-escalation, training and protocols and procedures related to that. 

0:28:22 - David Williams
Now, if I put myself in the shoes of a prospective customer, maybe a skeptical one, I may say you know, Shan, you've identified this problem. You're right, this is the kind of the approach we shouldn't just rely on metal detectors, we shouldn't just rely on de-escalation training. But you know what? I've got this nurse call system I already use to bring the nurses together. If somebody codes, I have a way to quickly get people over there. And I've got these real-time location systems for tracking assets and people. Why don't I just build that in as a feature to one of those things? 

0:28:53 - Shan Sinha
Yeah, and in fact many of them do have a number of features that are ostensibly directed towards trying to address this challenge. I think there's a number of things that you will see that translate to limitations, where those systems don't tend to work, and you know, I'll kind of break those down into a couple of categories. I think number one you know you have these nurse call buttons and things like that. I think number one you know you have these nurse call buttons and things like that they're typically designed as these wired things on the wall that patients you know can use to try to you know, signal their nurses for help and when they need something. But the reality is, you know you might be on the other side of the room, you might be in a hallway where somebody is escalating. I can't get to a nurse call button if I'm being held or you know which happens all the time or if I'm in the corner and I can't get to it. So these physical you know tools aren't particularly helpful and even if I do use them or if I'm yelling out a code of some kind, we're already at the point where a situation is fully escalated. The real advantage of a wearable solution is that it's discreet and you can signal for help to help again lower that temperature. We like to think about our product in the same way that you think about PPE. You know masks and gloves for pathogens. We like to think about our wearable technology and, in general, this category of wearable technology that we pioneered. We like to think about that as this lightweight, wireless tool that you always have with you, that belongs to you, as opposed to something in your environment that you might have to get to in order to get help. Where this really shows up, david, I think, is by being lightweight and wireless and something that I can carry with me. I can use it wherever I am. We have infrastructure, and this leads to the second big advantage that we offer. We have infrastructure that allows organizations to protect their staff in every square foot of their facility. That includes indoors and buildings, that includes in parking lots and parking garages, that includes caregivers that are going out into the community and working in individuals' homes. The same button that you keep with you can be used no matter where you are and it is a simple, one-click way to signal for the help that automatically figures out which resources make sense in that moment, oftentimes that infrastructure to install. For most of these other solutions like you're alluding to asset tracking solutions and things like that that we see they're way too expensive. They create way too much disruption in your offset and can typically if they even are affordable enough can only be affordable for a small footprint. 

You need to be able to protect your staff everywhere. I'll give you a stat. We looked at all the data from the last year. 60% of incidents that are legitimate alert incidents where people needed help, are in locations where you would expect EDs, behavioral health units, areas like that. The 40% of incidents, they happen everywhere else in the hospital. There's no rhyme or reason to one unit versus another. So these are the types of incidents that are happening all across your hospital and it ends up becoming important to not require any caveats to your staff whenever they need help, because they might need help wherever they are. It might be somebody delivering food, it might be somebody doing medical transport, it might be a nurse, it could be anybody. You want to be able to protect everybody everywhere across your facilities. Those are the organizations that tend to see the biggest impact. 

0:32:24 - David Williams
Okay, makes sense. So you alluded to this other piece. So if I think about a hospital, one thing is there's a lot of staff around, so if you want something and staff knows that you need it, they'll come. They could be there very quickly. A lot of care is being delivered outside of the facility. Now, the thing about caring somebody's home is, of course, it may be a little less stressful. In a sense. They're in their environment, they feel more control, and so on. Nonetheless, this problem of aggression and violence doesn't go away. You've got a new offering I think it's new Canopy Go. That's designed for that. Is it literally the same button? I mean, how do you deal with it? Obviously, you're not going to bring 20 staff along from the hospital just to be there in case somebody needs something. So what's the same, what's different? 

0:33:07 - Shan Sinha
No, that's exactly right. You're exactly right. That part of the environment can be, hopefully, a little less stressful in that you're in individuals' homes. The thing to remember is these individuals that are healthcare workers. They are seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of patients every single year, and it doesn't take a large number of unsafe situations to create what could be a very you know, dramatically negative outcome. And so the unfortunate reality of some of these healthcare workers is that they end up having to go into environments again, not all the time, but at least some of the time. That can be quite scary, and so there might be, you know, a drug dealer, or there might be somebody who is responsible for a big part of a gang that needs health care, and these are all individuals that you know. Hospitals and caregivers take as their responsibility to provide care, regardless of who they are, and so they will oftentimes go into these environments where you know what it can be very lonely, it can be very anxiety inducing, and some of the stories that you hear are truly frightening. And so the way that our solution works yes, so Canopy Go is our solution that we've created for large organizations. It's built on the Canopy Protect platform that gives healthcare workers who are on the go, who are outside, working outside of their hospital a way to use the very same button to trigger a notification for help. The way that works is it works with a companion application that we've created that works over iOS and Android devices. You can implement the policy that makes sense for your organization in terms of what happens when somebody presses that button. 

There's a few things that could happen. Number one you can notify local law enforcement through a dispatch service that we provide that connects 911 to that individual. We can simultaneously signal your central hospital security team so that they can coordinate with those 911 first responders. All of the information associated with that individual GPS coordinates, you know the name of the individual, any contact information that we might have all of that information is supplied to all of these individuals. We can also notify other stakeholders in your organization. If there's leadership or managers that need to be notified, all of those people can be automatically coordinated in a response to get somebody help, so that they're walking into an environment knowing that they have an instant connection to folks, and it will work through your mobile phone. So those are the two pieces, but it's all built on the canopy technology, so you get the reliability, the quality, the capabilities all of that that stem from giving hospitals a single comprehensive platform to extend protection to caregivers no matter where they're working. 

0:36:15 - David Williams
Shan, last question for you changing the subject, unless you want to keep it where it is, which is I'm looking for a book recommendation. Have you read any good? 

0:36:26 - Shan Sinha
books lately, anything you would recommend for our audience. Yeah, I try to read as much as I can these days, although it gets a little bit harder when you're busier. But I would say probably my favorite book that I have read in the last recent sort of past year, it's a book called Numbers Don't Lie by Vaclav Smil. It is I mean it's just an amazingly wonderful book. 

He just takes, like he just takes, he really understands what exponential growth and incremental improvement really looks like and he applies that to you know sort of how technology innovation has taken shape in a lot of different categories. So he looks at energy and he looks at electric vehicles and has all these amazing insights on well, why aren't cargo ships, you know, electric yet? Why is it that planes haven't really been able to become electric yet? What's going on with food waste and why are we, you know kind of, you know why do we have so much food waste and what would be required to make that waste go away. You know he just goes through all sorts of different trends that really affect us as a species, almost as we kind of think about, you know, growth in the 21st century, and it's just, it's a really, really wonderful book, so highly recommended. 

0:37:52 - David Williams
Great Well, thanks for that recommendation. Well, Shan Sinha, CEO of Canopy, I want to say thanks so much for joining me today on the Health Biz Podcast. 

0:38:01 - Shan Sinha
Thanks a lot for having me, David. Really enjoyed the conversation. 

0:38:05 - David Williams
You've been listening to the Health Biz Podcast with me, David Williams, president of Health Business Group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in healthcare, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite service. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There's more good stuff to come and you won't want to miss an episode. If your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in healthcare, check out our website, healthbusinessgroup.com.