Meet Breanna Hetland, Co-founder and CEO at Family Room, LLC / Associate Professor at UNMC College of Nursing

Familyroom.health is a UNMC-created digital platform designed to help families and caregivers navigate the stressful situation of a loved one in the ICU. The goal is to empower individuals to be a part of the treatment process, allowing them to track patient symptoms and their own worries, while keeping medical staff informed and less overwhelmed.

Hetland has recently received national recognition with an American Academy of Nursing’s Edge Runner Award and a $2 million grant from the NIH STTR program — announcing it has broken funding records in Nebraska.

What inspired you to become an entrepreneur or support other entrepreneurs?

I saw a need, and then I experienced it myself. As a critical care nurse, I always connected well with families. My patients often couldn’t communicate, so I learned to lean on their families to understand how I could improve the care I was giving.

Then I became the family, and I experienced critical care through that lens. It fundamentally changed how I felt about the way our healthcare system handles family involvement during a hospitalization.

I knew I could research this problem for an entire career, but unless we got our knowledge and solutions out of research and into practice, I couldn’t make a real difference for families across the country.

What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time to when you were just starting out?

Be extremely disciplined, patient, creative and downright gritty.

Discipline: I’m building this company while raising a young family, and the constant trade-offs between the two are the real character builders. To stay focused, I do the same things every week: I protect my gym time, eat the same foods and prioritize sleep. It’s not exciting, but every decision I don’t have to make is energy I can spend on the company.

The other weekly practice that matters most is my faith. It keeps me grounded when the work gets hard.

Patience: Expect this to take longer and bring more rejection than you think. I had no idea how long it would take or how much rejection I’d face. I figured my academic career had prepared me, since peer review is basically professional rejection training.

It turns out startups have their own version, and sometimes it’s just silence.

Creativity: Get creative about buying back your time. As a mother, I think of time as a commodity: It’s limited, everyone wants some of it and you can’t make more. So, I’ve gotten good at making our family time count and lining up help for everything life requires.

I can’t do it all, and I’ve stopped pretending I can.

Grit: Be willing to do the things nobody else wants to do. Building a company means the follow-up to the follow-up email and the fifth revision of the budget. Nobody hands out trophies for that work, but it’s usually the difference between an idea and a company.

A mantra I live by: “I’ve never been the smartest person in the room. I’m just the one who will quit last.”

How can the Nebraska community support you?

First, share us with people who need us. We have a free version on our website that any family, in any state or hospital, can use when they suddenly find themselves in a caregiver role. Please pass it along.

Second, share your own story with us. The best way for us to gain traction is through people who have lived this and can speak to the need. Whether you’re a patient, a family member, a clinician or an executive, your story is more powerful than anything else we could say.

Lastly, we need visibility and connections both in and outside of Nebraska. Healthcare sales are complicated and built entirely on relationships, so any connections you can offer are deeply appreciated.