Kwema’s badge reels with panic buttons provide a solution to violence against nurses

The St. Louis-based startup Kwema is keen on preventing workplace violence in healthcare settings by transforming the plastic badge reel where a healthcare worker’s ID dangles from into an easy way to call for help. 

“We made that retractable badge reel smart,” says Kwema CEO and founder Ali Jabry. 

Press the button for three seconds and the device vibrates, indicating to security the precise location of the person wearing it who needs help. “It could be in a 2 million square foot facility, and security or your nursing peers will know exactly where you are and come to your aid to prevent and de-escalate that situation of violence,” Jabry says.

That kind of panic button can prove critical for nurses and health care systems alike, he says. The nation is experiencing a nursing shortage, and Jabry argues one culprit is workplace violence, with more than two nurses assaulted every hour on average in the U.S. 

“You would think that everybody in the healthcare system would know that there’s a lot of violence in healthcare,” he says. “But the truth is a lot of people don’t know that, especially if they’re not frontline workers.”

A panic button offers a powerful solution to de-escalate a potentially violent situation in a discreet way, something Jabry says is paramount. “The thing is, you can’t really unlock your phone when somebody’s shouting at you and about to be physically violent, because that’s going to make the situation worse,” he says. 

Kwema has existing technology partnerships with WiFi network manufacturers in Cisco Networks, Juniper Networks and HPE Aruba that Jabry says make up 80 percent of the market. This allows for Kwema’s badge reel to piggyback off a hospital’s existing WiFi, he adds.

“We do our own algorithm to locate people within buildings using their WiFi network,” Jabry explains. “It’s a plug-and-play kind of process that really gets a lot of buy-in from different healthcare departments, from security to nursing leadership to CFOs, because we’re leveraging their existing investments and then also solving a big problem they need solved immediately.”

Jabry says Kwema can also work in home health settings by piggybacking off cell networks to send GPS coordinates of a worker in distress to their parent company or the police. 

The idea for the company actually has its roots outside of healthcare. Toward the end of 2015 a close friend of Jabry’s was kidnapped in broad daylight while she was traveling in South America. Jabry says he and his friends managed to get the story of the kidnapping to go viral on social media, which prompted the kidnappers to release their victim

“We were thinking, what if we could replicate that? Where when you’re in danger, you press a button and somebody knows where you are, and it’s discreet where nobody notices you press the button,” Jabry says.

Kwema was inspired by that question, with early iterations that looked like jewelry. Jabry says they realized people were buying their product for a sense of safety in their everyday lives, which led the company to pivot to employee safety and eventually to healthcare settings after securing a patent on its smart badge reel.

The idea won a $50,000 grant from Arch Grants in 2020, and now is set for another boost as one of 20 companies selected for this year’s cohort of the Heathworx Accelerator, which is part of the innovation and investment arm of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, which is based in Maryland and Washington, D.C..

The accelerator brings selected startups the opportunity for a small investment and direct connections to a range of experts across healthcare, including those with backgrounds spanning hospital systems, insurance providers and pharmaceutical companies, says Soo Jeon, who leads the Healthworx Accelerator at Healthworx.

“Every company that we select really fits the North Star of improving healthcare outcomes and making healthcare more affordable,” says “There’s a lot of very creative options that sometimes don’t necessarily fit in really cleanly with payers. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t impact our patients’ lives, or doesn’t impact our members’ lives.”

Kwema’s solution is an example of that. Even though it doesn’t fit neatly into what might be considered traditional health care innovation, she argues that doesn’t diminish its merit for insurers.

“They’re approaching healthcare in a very broad lens that will inevitably impact the providers that we work with,” Jeon says. “There’s a lot of folks that are vulnerable, and I think being able to keep them safe is a prerequisite before we even talk about what type of care we bring in. And I think Kwema just did a really good job of drawing our attention to why [this matters].”

Plus, Jeon says it’s gratifying to expand Healthworx Accelerator’s reach beyond traditional hubs in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, or Boston.

“It’s still very much powered by the large cities where a lot of tech entrepreneurs are, where entrepreneurs are, period,” Jeon says. “I know St. Louis has a lot of talented folks; I would just want to do more in the next year, and even further, to be able to meet more healthcare founders in the middle of America.”

Jeon says the value of the Healthworx Accelerator for a company like Kwema and the rest in this year’s cohort lies in making connections within the industry and providing other resources and information to the founders. 

“There’s a lot of different innovations, and not everyone is able to talk to the right stakeholders at the right time,” she says. “To be able to expedite and streamline some of that, it is invaluable, and probably [worth a lot more] to these creators than a check.”

All companies in the accelerator are also offered a small investment, which could be followed up with a larger one too, Jeon says. The parent of the accelerator, Healthworx, also has a venture studio that helps build novel health care-related business from scratch and operates venture funds that make later stage investments, she says. 

For Jabry, Heathworx Accelerator presents a great opportunity for his company to make connections with players in the health care space and find advisors as the company looks to start “scaling drastically.” He adds it’s crucial to have partnerships and advisors who’ve already had success.

“We’re going to be shipping millions of [badge] reels in the next few years,” he says. “To do that, we need to learn from the best-in-class, who have scaled technologies in healthcare systems, whether from an IT standpoint, a human resource standpoint, a security standpoint, even an insurance standpoint.”

There’s interest from health care providers in the U.S. UK, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, and Norway, Jabry says. 

“We are inundated with prospects,” he says. “We have a lot of customers we have to execute on in the next 12 months.”

Editors Note: A previous version of this story misspelled Ali Jabry’s name. The post has been updated with the correct spelling. We regret the error.