Ask Justin Green what drives his work, and he’ll tell you it comes down to something straightforward: even in high-acuity, emotionally charged situations, nurses and other healthcare staff deserve to feel safe and supported as they deliver care. Workplace violence should never be accepted as a part of the job. The more he worked alongside healthcare leaders and frontline staff, the clearer it became that the problem wasn’t a lack of awareness. Though it’s chronically underreported, hospital leaders knew workplace violence was happening. What was missing was a reliable and discreet way for frontline staff to signal duress when they felt unsafe. That missing piece of the puzzle became his focus, and it has been ever since.
Canopy’s founders had previously spent decades building technology companies across both B2B and B2C markets, and when they turned their attention to healthcare, they saw the same gap Justin had identified. When they connected in 2019, the team recognized an opportunity to transform staff safety in the healthcare environment by enabling early intervention and de-escalation for every caregiver across every facility.
Building Safety Technology Around How Healthcare Actually Works
The founding principle behind Canopy was that healthcare workers should not have to choose between doing their jobs and being safe.
Justin and Canopy’s founders used their respective expertise to focus on what hospitals actually need from a safety platform to deliver on two parallel goals: ensuring caregivers feel safe at work and reducing the number of escalated, violent incidents. This demanded a technology that could work reliably in complex care environments, provide actionable location information across large campuses, and make it easier for staff to get help quickly when they needed it.
The result was Canopy’s Connected Safety Platform, a wearable duress solution designed to give healthcare workers an immediate, discreet way to call for help and get the right people to the right place in seconds.
What a Connected Safety Platform Looks Like in Practice
Today, Justin serves as Canopy’s VP of Strategy, shaping how the company’s connected safety platform evolves alongside the needs of healthcare organizations.
Canopy now supports hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers across health systems nationwide, giving organizations a connected way to help protect staff across hospitals, campuses, and other care environments. The platform is designed to do more than document an incident after the fact. It helps organizations create a safer environment before, during, and after an incident. And by giving staff a discreet, immediate way to call for help the moment something feels off, Canopy can actually change the course of an escalating incident before it is too late. Real-time location data ensures the right people get to the right place as fast as possible. In addition, by developing a deeper culture of safety and encouraging early reporting, system leaders are finally able to track the data they need to see the full picture of staff safety across their organization, informing other decisions and investments on an ongoing basis.
Seven Years Focused on Safer Healthcare Workplaces
What began as a shared observation about a gap in healthcare safety has grown, over the past seven years, into a company focused entirely on closing it.
Workplace violence should never be accepted as part of working in healthcare. The people caring for patients deserve to feel safe doing it. That has been the driving belief behind Justin’s work from the beginning, and it remains the work he and the Canopy team continue to pursue today.
Building technology around one of healthcare’s most urgent challenges, and helping make safety an expected part of every shift, is not a small undertaking. But for Justin, it has always been the right one.
Watch Justin Green and Beebe Healthcare Discuss the Business Case for Staff
Justin recently sat down with R.L. Hughes, Director of Safety, Security, and Sustainability at Beebe Healthcare, to talk through exactly how Beebe built the case for investing in staff safety. Watch the full webinar replay to hear the conversation firsthand.
