Pulse
Hospital Geeks
A unique Geek Squad precinct provides tech support for hospitalized children and their families.
By Allison Campbell Jensen
If patients, families, or visitors stop and peer into the narrow office just inside the skyway leading from the parking ramp at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota in Minneapolis, they’ll see two guys wearing black slacks, white shirts, narrow ties, and shiny badges. They’re not security officers. They’re technicians or “agents” in the country’s first hospital-based Geek Squad precinct.
Their mission is “curing” the ills of the electronic gadgets patients and their families bring to the hospital. The Geek Squad is a subsidiary of Richfield-based Best Buy, which is donating the agents’ services. “We take the badges very seriously,” says Matthew Wold, one of the agents assigned to Children’s since the precinct opened in 2009.
Wold and his Geek Squad colleagues might assist families with charging a cell phone, setting up a CaringBridge site, uploading photographs, or connecting to the hospital’s Wi-Fi network, among other things. They also lend out laptops, digital cameras, and camcorders. They soon hope to make GPS systems available for patients to check out as well.
Roots of the Relationship
In the late 1990s, staff at Children’s began noticing that families increasingly relied on technology when their children were in the hospital. According to Kendall Munson, coordinator of the Family Resource Center, technology “is no longer an amenity. It’s expected.”
But when technology fails, it only compounds the frustration and inconvenience that goes along with having a child in the hospital for a prolonged period.
Karen Hohertz-Jacobs remembers feeling that frustration in 2007 when her 11-month-old daughter was undergoing treatment for cancer at Children’s. After a long, stressful day of treatments and pain management attempts for her daughter, Hohertz-Jacobs, Best Buy’s senior director of retail operations, wanted an escape. “I just needed to watch ‘American Idol,’” she says. But the screen on the outmoded television in her daughter’s room displayed in only green and purple. Instead of the show, Hohertz-Jacobs saw a need. So she posted on her CaringBridge site that she wanted to help Children’s move into the digital age.
She connected with another parent, Jeff Weness, who also was working for Best Buy at the time. His second child had been diagnosed with a congenital heart defect in utero. After she was born, he and his wife spent three months in the hospital while their daughter had a series of heart surgeries. “When you’re in there, it feels like life stops,” Weness says, “but really everything continues on around you. You still need to pay the bills and keep up with work and email and keep your friends and family updated.”
To prepare for long hospital stays, he and his wife packed a technology bag with everything from a laptop capable of connecting to the Internet without using the hospital’s then-unreliable wireless network to a mini DVD player. Other families were not as well-equipped, Weness noticed. And, if there were breakdowns, there was no one to help.
Weness joined a parent advisory council at Children’s and after discussions with Hohertz-Jacobs mentioned the tech challenges they and other parents experienced. Their feedback led hospital officials to approach Best Buy and several other vendors about purchasing updated televisions and Xboxes. The hospital also added a wireless network specifically for patients and families as part of an expansion project that was completed in November.
When Best Buy executives came to Children’s to see the new flat-panel TVs and Xboxes in the patient rooms, Weness says, they asked a key question: “‘How are you going to keep all this working?’ That was an ‘aha’ for us.” With 330 rooms and no one on staff with expertise in consumer electronics, Children’s could have a support problem. So two Best Buy executives, Chico Ford and Dean Kimberly, suggested donating Geek Squad support services and establishing the precinct inside the hospital.
Serving Growing Techno Needs
When the Geek Squad agents first arrived at the hospital, they didn’t know how they’d be received, Wold says, explaining that they were “coming into someone else’s territory.” The Family Resource Center loaned out laptops to families, and members of the IT staff kept them running. But consumer electronics wasn’t their area of expertise, nor did they have the time to tend to people’s personal computers. “The hospital is fundamentally there to take care of your child and their health—not to make sure you have an Xbox that works in your room,” says Weness, who is now senior director of corporate development for Children’s.
The Geek Squad agents have been able to take pressure off the IT staff, and patients and families appreciate the fact that they’re available from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days a week (noon to 7 p.m. Sundays). Posters and signs with the Geek Squad’s phone number are plastered prominently around the hospital. Geek Squad agents respond quickly to requests for help. Along with charging cell phones and checking out laptops, they go to patients’ rooms (gloving up, if necessary) to connect parents to the wireless network or to set up videoconferencing so patients can speak with siblings or teachers.
Pat Lang, a working single mother of a 13-year-old who has a rare, progressive disease, appreciated their assistance and expertise when she needed to sync her brand-new Blackberry and her laptop in order to take part in an important teleconference at work. She says she was “freaking out” until she saw the sign for the Geek Squad and went in to ask for help. The agents walked her through the process, and she was able to take part in the meeting the next day. Lang says: “Nobody even knew where I was doing my teleconference.”
Best Buy’s Ford says the hospital-based Geek Squad idea may be catching on. The company is now in talks about providing such services to several other hospitals around the country. He notes the arrangements likely will be different than those Best Buy has with Children’s.
Says Weness: “It makes our doctors’ jobs easier when the kids and families are less stressed.”