(By: Sandy Eller)

Two years after it first launched when hospitals instituted strict no visitation policies at the height of the pandemic that left patients completely isolated, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit is continuing to keep families through the use of paired tablets.

WellTab made headlines when its Chasidic volunteers began showing up at area medical center with loaner tablets in April 2020, in some cases giving them to patients in Hatzalah ambulances en route to the hospital and in others adding them to their food deliveries. But even as the pandemic has subsided, WellTab has continued its efforts, with nearly 15,500 paired tablets having been pressed into use all over the world during the past 24 months.

The tablets are hospital and patient-friendly and are mounted to the side of patients’ beds. A pause button allows for privacy when needed and while WellTab’s Samsung tablets are internet based, it is a locked system that can connect only to another paired device. WellTab’s Dovid Hoffman explained that the system’s benefits can be crucial to a patient’s wellbeing.

“When a patient isn’t well, having someone to advocate for them is extremely important,” Hoffman told Yeshiva World News. “While of course having someone at a patient’s bedside is always best, keeping a patient connected to family and their home environment is invaluable. Particularly when a patient is feeling abandoned, keeping them connected offers amazing health benefits that cannot be overestimated.”

1200 set of tablets are currently active, with WellTab’s 24/7 tech support devoting 3,256 hours of time on the phone with users over the past two years. Loaner tablets are available at no cost in most large Jewish communities and WellTab shifts its stock to areas according to the demand for its services.

“WellTab has really become part of the community,” said Hoffman. “Just like we have Hatzalah, we have WellTab.”

A WellTab tech support representative and distributor who asked to be identified only as Mrs. Scharf said that she became involved with WellTab after witnessing its benefits when her brother was hospitalized with COVID in Israel last winter during a time when hospitalizations were still extremely limited.

“He was sedated for three days and after waking up and feeling a little better we set up a WellTab for his wife, who also had COVID,” said Mrs. Scharf. “She hadn’t seen him in two weeks and when she saw him, she started screaming ‘Yossi, I can see you. Yossi can you see me?’ The first thing he said to me when he came home was ‘you should know that WellTab is what made me realize that I have a family and I had a reason to get better.’”

As a member of the WellTab team, Mrs. Scharf has heard from patients whose high blood pressure problems disappeared completely just hours after finally getting to see their families, as well as other instances where the device has saved lives.

“We have had people who thought they could get out of bed on their own and fallen and family members have called us and told us that their father was on the floor,” said Mrs. Scharf. “In one instance, we had a patient who was choking in bed and couldn’t press the button for help, but family members saw what was happening and called for help.”

Shimon Rolnitzky became acquainted with WellTab after Chanukah when he donated a kidney through Renewal, which recommends the devices to its patients and donors. He awoke from surgery to see his family’s faces on his WellTab.

“The whole time I was in the hospital, I felt like I was at home,” recalled Rolnitzky. “When my kids came home from school, they ran to WellTab to be with me, to tell me their stories and to do their homework with me.”

Rolnitzky spoke about someone he knew who passed away alone in the hospital during COVID. His wife had been aware of WellTab’s existence, but didn’t realize it could be of any benefit to her husband who was intubated at the time.

“Scientific research has shown that people who are intubated can hear and even see things,” said Rolnitzky. “Imagine what a difference it would have made for him in the last weeks of his life to see and hear his family and for them to have been with him. Sometimes you come across inventions that you wonder how the world lived without it and WellTab is one of those. Everyone in a hospital should have one of these.”

For more information on WellTab, visit them online at www.welltab.org or call them at 917-999-0102.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)