How Coastal Medical engaged their EMT workforce across New England
Coastal Medical Transportation Systems, LLC is a 24/7 emergency and non-emergency transportation systems serving healthcare institutions and patients across New England, USA.
Coastal in numbers
92%
monthly active users
98%
adoption rate
5.7
daily app opens
Our emergency medical services (EMS) providers are the bedrock of our U.S. healthcare system. They are on the frontlines of health and wellness crises in our communities, providing lifesaving care and transportation to people in critical need.
The leadership team at Coastal Medical Transportation Systems, a 24/7 emergency and non-emergency transportation system serving healthcare institutions and patients across New England, knows firsthand the importance of their emergency medical technicians (EMTs) and paramedics. With employees spanning from pre-medical school caregivers to 30-year EMS experts, Coastal Medical supports a diverse and highly skilled workforce.
When Coastal Medical saw a gap in their communications workflow, they didn’t hesitate to take action to ensure their workforce had the resources and information they needed. By investing in their employee communications, they saw an opportunity to invest in their employee success and help their workforce focus on what matters most: providing critical care to their communities.
Communicating during a global pandemic
For many people, the world seemed to come to a standstill when Covid became a global pandemic — but not for Coastal Medical. Their providers were still spending every day in the ambulance — their “office,” as they jokingly call it — and were busier than ever as they cared for their neighbors and patients during a global pandemic.
However, as policies and procedures were rapidly changing — mask or no mask, gatherings or isolation — the leaders at Coastal Medical quickly realized they no longer had a way to communicate information to all workers at once. The big town halls and department check-ins they had previously relied on to communicate everything from benefits changes to shift updates were no longer an option. Emails didn’t work for the frontline workforce, individual phone calls took too much time, and meetings wouldn’t catch everyone across different shifts.
“We had to get a bunch of information out to the workforce very quickly, so we started looking at different ways of doing it.”
The Coastal Medical team decided on Blink to help bridge these communication gaps and bring together their 800-person frontline workforce on one employee app.
Curating a dynamic frontline experience
It took some time to find the right balance of communications cadence, format, and content. Not posting enough on the feed could lead to disinterest in engaging with the platform — and posting too much could actually lead to the same result, with employees overwhelmed by the amount of information on the app.
Through testing and iteration, Coastal Medical established the right rhythm of communications and content to keep their employees informed while also giving them opportunities to post their own insights, share feedback and concerns, and celebrate milestones and workday wins.
“People check Facebook and apps like these on a daily basis. How can we send communications on policies and day-to-day operations that everyone will see?”
In addition to sharing company-wide communications that are relevant to all employees, such as business memos or policy updates, the leadership team is able to create content streams that target specific locations or employee groups. They can share personalized communications — such as information that is highly relevant to providers on a specific team or in a particular regional division — at scale. This allows them to get critical updates to the right people at the right time while reducing the risk of communications fatigue to the rest of the employee base.
Building culture as a strategic imperative
One of the biggest challenges facing the healthcare industry today is employee attrition. Every organization in the health services sector — from community care centers and world-renowned hospitals to medical transportation and long-term care facilities — is struggling to keep their nurse, physician, and caregiver workforce.
The ambulance service space is no different: The retention rate of paramedics and EMTs is low, and the cost to replace them is high, averaging at $70,000 per paramedic for a 6-month onboarding period. This makes employee engagement not just an HR priority, but a direct input to the bottom line of any health organization.
Facing this industry-wide strain on people resources, Coastal Medical prioritized culture-building technologies and internal initiatives that could help them retain their lifesaving workforce.
Over the past decade, Coastal Medical has thoughtfully and collaboratively built a culture that still feels small and community-centric even as they’ve grown throughout the New England region. Through Blink’s centralized news feed, team groups, and resource hub, Coastal Medical has been able to seamlessly communicate that culture across their 19 total ambulance bases.
Michael Pieretti, Chief Quality Officer
Measuring the impact of a one-stop shop
Following the rollout of a company-wide employee experience platform, Coastal Medical leaders weren’t just focused on static metrics, like app adoption and traffic. Their barometer for success revolved around genuine employee interest and ongoing engagement. They wanted to see the power of the platform in action, a steady stream of employees jumping on to respond to messages, communicate to colleagues, and react to company news and announcements.
They were thrilled as they watched the app come to life across their workforce, from the operational team to clinical responders.
The ability for anyone to message someone on their team or in the office and receive an instant reply has been a game-changer for Coastal Medical’s communications strategy. And because the in-app resource hub houses everything needed to effectively do their job — like easy-to-complete crash incident reports forms — employees don’t have to go searching through all of their other work tools to get what they need.
For the leaders at Coastal Medical, the work to make Blink their one workplace app has worked — and is paying dividends for their culture. Across HR, communications, and operations, every function is using and benefiting from having a one-stop shop for all workforce communication and collaboration.
With their widely dispersed frontline workforce aligned at last, Coastal Medical is well positioned to continue to provide exceptional care to their communities for decades to come.
Jose Caballero, Director of Operations
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