Who the founder is and how she sounds
Before I write a word for a founder, I write this. It’s what keeps every post sounding like them and not like “LinkedIn.”
- Founder
- Dana Reyes, RN — Founder & CEO
- Company
- Wend Health — helps health systems make sure seriously ill patients get the care they actually want, by turning advance care planning from a filed form into a conversation that reaches the bedside.
- Who she’s reaching
- Health-system clinical leaders (palliative care, ICU, quality), plus the clinicians who’d use it.
- Voice
- Never
- Signature moves
The origin story, in her voice
This is the anchor piece, the “why” every future post can draw from. Ghostwritten to sound like Dana, not like me.
I left the ICU because we were very good at the wrong thing
The night I decided to leave, we spent four hours doing everything modern medicine can offer for a man who, I’m pretty sure, would have asked us to stop.
He was 78. He came in from a nursing home. No family at the bedside yet, no paperwork that told us anything except his name and his medications. So we did what we’re trained to do when we don’t know: everything. Chest compressions. A breathing tube. The whole machinery of not-dying.
His daughter arrived after nine minutes of coding and said, through tears: “He told us he didn’t want this.”
He had. We just hadn’t gotten the memo.
I spent eleven years as an ICU nurse, and I was good at it. I could run a code with my voice steady. It wasn’t the deaths that wore me down. It was the nights we brought the full weight of the ICU down on someone who would have said, gently, please, no.
For a while, I thought the fix was a form. Fill out an advance directive, save it in the chart, done. But documents are unreliable in a crisis — and just as often, no one ever had the conversation at all. When a patient comes in critical, without the paperwork and without anyone to tell us what they would have wanted, a person’s own voice falls out of their care.
That’s why I left — and it’s what I built Wend to solve. Not an app that stores a document. A way to make sure the conversation actually happens, and then to put the answer where a clinician will see it at 3 a.m. without going looking for it. The technology is the easy part. The hard part is treating what a person wants at the end of their life as a piece of medical information worth capturing as carefully as their blood pressure.
I don’t think that’s radical. It’s the thing every clinician I know already wishes they had. We just stopped waiting for someone else to build it.
Some nights I still think about that daughter in the hallway. We can’t give her that night back. But there’s another family tonight, in another ICU, and the whole point of Wend is that they never have to stand where she stood.
What a founder actually hands me — and what I hand back
Founders don’t have time to write; they have thoughts. I take whatever Dana can give me this week and turn it into three posts that still sound like her.
Last week I asked thirty new ICU nurses a simple question: how many of you have ever seen an advance directive actually change what happened at a bedside?
Two hands went up.
It’s not that the other twenty-eight are careless. They’re some of the best nurses I’ve ever worked with. It’s that we’ve quietly filed advance care planning under “legal,” not “clinical.” It’s a form to complete and a box to check, not a decision that changes what we do at 3 a.m.
That’s the gap I started Wend to close. A wish that never reaches the bedside isn’t really a wish. It’s just a document.
We measure the wrong thing in advance care planning, and families pay for it.
We count whether the form exists. We almost never count whether the wish was honored. Those are completely different numbers — and the second one is the only one that matters to the person in the bed.
A 90% documentation rate feels like success, right up until you meet the family whose father was in the 90% and still got a code he’d said no to.
Track the second number. It’s harder to measure, but it’s the whole job.
“Where do we even start?” is the question I get most from health systems on advance care planning.
Start with one unit, one question asked at the right time, and one place the answer lives that everyone can see. Make it small enough to actually happen.
Most “transformation” stalls because it started too big. This only works if it starts small.