Modernizing Healthcare Communication To Drive Workforce Engagement And Operational Excellence: A Spotlight On Firstup

Firstup commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Firstup.¹ This abstract will focus on the healthcare industry’s use of Firstup and its value to these organizations. For this study, Forrester spoke to four representatives from healthcare organizations with the following roles and company sizes:

• Chief innovation officer and patient safety officer (14,000 employees).

• VP of marketing and communications (10,000 employees).

• VP, people operations (10,000 employees).

• Assistant director of communications and marketing operations (9,000 employees).

Healthcare organizations today operate in a highly complex, high-stakes environment defined by distributed workforces and an ongoing need to improve patient outcomes and employee experiences. Many providers rely on large populations of frontline workers who often lack consistent access to traditional digital tools like email or intranet systems. As a result, critical information is frequently fragmented across channels such as email, static intranets, and manager-led communication cascades, creating gaps in message delivery, limited visibility into engagement, and increased risk of missed or delayed updates.

This environment contributes to several challenges, including low employee engagement, communication overload, and limited ability to target messages effectively to specific roles or locations. Important updates such as safety protocols, compliance requirements, and operational changes get buried in communications, increasing risk and inefficiencies for employees and patients. Additionally, these organizations often lack centralized analytics to measure communication effectiveness, making it difficult to continuously improve outreach efforts.

Firstup is a workforce communications platform designed to address these challenges by centralizing and personalizing employee communications across channels. It enables small, medium, and large healthcare organizations to deliver timely, targeted, and role-relevant messages to all employees, including hard-to-reach frontline staff, through mobile, email, intranet, and digital signage. By replacing fragmented tools with a unified system, Firstup streamlines content creation, automates audience targeting, and provides robust analytics to measure engagement and prove the outcomes it drives.

Investment Drivers For Healthcare Organizations

The interviewees’ organizations adopted Firstup to optimize the workforce experience for their frontline workers. These organizations struggled with several challenges in their legacy environments, including:

• High frontline employee attrition from low employee engagement. Interviewees noted that communications were not personalized or inclusive in their prior environments, leading employees to feel overlooked and disconnected from company culture. This lack of relevance and recognition reduced motivation, trust, and overall engagement, leading to frontline employee turnover.
  The VP of marketing and communications discussed the lack of a mobile solution in their prior environment, making it difficult to reach frontline and clinical employees in real time with relevant messaging. The interviewee commented: “We lacked the ability to segment our audiences, so most communications were sent to everyone regardless of role, location, or relevance. Just as importantly, there was no easy way for employees to engage back with us (e.g., no commenting, feedback, or interaction) which limited connection and transparency.”

• Safety and patient care hazards from missed critical updates. Interviewees said it was difficult for their employees to spot critical updates in their prior environment when they were flooded with emails, chats, and notifications every day. Important messages got buried in the noise, leading to missed actions, delays, and unnecessary confusion. The lack of targeted and clear communications led to safety incidents that could otherwise have been avoided.
  The assistant director of communications and marketing operations commented, “We needed a solution that could reliably reach our frontline workforce and get critical information to them directly, [versus] hoping it trickled down through managers or by word of mouth.”

• Communication gaps. Interviewees discussed how frontline employees often missed timely, relevant information due to scattered messages across fragmented channels. Communications felt generic or poorly timed, leaving workers disconnected from leadership and unaware of what truly mattered to their roles.
  The assistant director of communications and marketing operations used email as the primary communication channel before Firstup and did not know whether their messaging reached all employees. They commented: “Messages were sent to leaders and managers with the expectation that they would relay the information during meetings or huddles. There was no visibility into whether frontline staff actually received or understood the messages, which meant we were often crossing our fingers and hoping critical information made it to the people who needed it most.”

• Lack of integration and workflow efficiency. Interviewees highlighted a siloed intranet environment and disconnected communication tools that forced employees to jump between multiple systems to find information. This fragmented experience slowed work, increased friction, and reduced productivity, especially for frontline teams with limited time.
  The VP of marketing and communications discussed investing in Firstup versus building an in-house platform, commenting, “We avoided building and maintaining our own system, which would have required significant IT resources we simply didn’t have.”

• Limited analytics and insight. Interviewees said that without clear, actionable analytics, their organizations struggled to understand whether communications were reaching and engaging employees. This lack of insight made it difficult to refine strategies, demonstrate impact, or continuously improve employee communications.
  The VP of marketing and communications discussed the lack of a mobile solution in their prior environment, which made it difficult to reach frontline and clinical employees in real time with relevant messaging. The interviewee commented: “We had little visibility into whether messages were resonating or even being seen by the people who needed them most.”

Firstup Features

The interviewees’ organizations chose to invest in Firstup because it could:

• Deliver personalized, timely communications across frontline workers (e.g., mobile, email, intranet, digital signage).

• Connect every worker, including deskless and frontline employees, with relevant information from a single platform.

• Provide analytics and AI-driven insights to optimize engagement, performance, and outcomes.

• Establish a unified digital employee experience that integrates with existing systems and includes employee journey capabilities, enabling organizations to create first-year retention programs and send targeted messaging at key milestones.

Key Results For Healthcare Organizations

The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:

Increased retention for frontline employees. Interviewees demonstrated that Firstup played a critical role in improving their frontline employee retention by strengthening connection, visibility, and inclusion.

• Firstup contributed to a 4% reduction in overall turnover for frontline employees. The VP of marketing and communications highlighted that internal communications through Firstup were vital to reducing overall turnover and attributed 30% of overall reduction in turnover toward efforts made with the platform. The interviewee commented: “We’ve seen a 16% year‑over‑year decrease in voluntary turnover and about a 15% decrease in first‑year turnover, with an even more significant reduction among nurses. Firstup was certainly a contributor to this improvement.”

• Communication initiatives supported by Firstup contributed to a 12-percentage-point improvement in retention for new frontline employees. The VP of marketing and communications highlighted that Firstup was critical to new employee onboarding within one specific department, particularly in driving awareness and participation. Leadership in this department built Firstup use into their onboarding process and noted a 12-percentage-point improvement in retention for employees who attended onboarding events promoted through the platform.

• Some interviewees highlighted that turnover continues to decrease year over year as communication initiatives improve with the platform. The assistant director of communications and marketing operations noted a correlation between improved communications with Firstup and improved employee experience, commenting: “There’s a correlation there. Year to date, after our first year of implementation, there was around a 4% decrease in turnover. And currently, we’ve projected around a 1% decrease year over year, just since the beginning of our fiscal year.”

Employee productivity savings. Interviewees consistently described productivity gains from spending less time searching for information and handling routine tasks on the centralized platform rather than hopping between systems.

• Scalable communication efficiencies resulted from centralizing communications into one platform. The VP of marketing and communications discussed the power of scaling time savings across a large workforce, commenting: “If we can save people time by keeping them inside one platform instead of hopping between systems, that’s meaningful at scale. One of the biggest productivity gains is eliminating extra clicks, extra logins, and extra steps to get information.”

• Employee engagement improved by delivering targeted, role-relevant, personalized messaging. The VP of marketing and communications at a healthcare organization discussed increased employee engagement with Firstup in reporting incidents, commenting, “With Firstup, we’ve made it much easier for people to report safety incidents, especially from a mobile device, something that wasn’t possible before.”

Risk reduction from improved safety and compliance. Firstup supported measurable improvements in safety outcomes at healthcare organizations by enabling more consistent, timely, and visible safety communications.

• Firstup enabled a 50% increase in near-miss reporting at one interviewee’s organization. The chief innovation officer and patient safety officer discussed Firstup’s criticality to their “Good Catch Program,” where employees were able to quickly report near-miss patient errors, citing a more than 50% increase in near-miss reporting using the platform. The interviewee commented: “Firstup expanded who could participate in safety, giving a broader population of team members access to the data and the stories behind it. When team members know they’re heard and their voice matters, safety reporting becomes an act of engagement, not compliance.”

• This same organization saw a 25% increase in adjusted patient day volume capacity as a result of increased near-miss reporting. The same interviewee also shared tangible examples of near-miss errors, including medication errors. They noted that their organization prevented 11 medication errors from reaching patients, which was directly tied to visibility and engagement created through Firstup. They commented, “Firstup helped surface critical medication issues earlier, turning potential harm into preventable events.”
  As a result of the improved, Firstup-enabled near-miss reporting, the healthcare organization was able to serve more patients and increased adjusted patient day volume capacity by 25%.