Omid Razmpour, graduate Brittain Award recipient, builds support systems for nurses

Omid Razmpour bears a Persian name like his father (who immigrated to Iowa from Iran) and freckles and bright red hair like his mother (a South Dakota native of Irish descent).

"They picked my name before they saw me and then I came out as this pale-skinned, ginger baby, which was kind of hilarious," Razmpour says.

It turns out that his paternal great grandmother - from a village in Turkey near the border of Georgia - had red hair, so both Razmpour's parents carried the recessive gene for the trait.

The contrast between his name and his appearance tended to confuse people in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, where Razmpour grew up. "My dad had a strong conviction about giving me a Persian first name," Razmpour says, "and he would tell me to be sure to correct people whenever they mispronounced it."

"Omid," pronounced "oh-meed," means "hope," Razmpour explains.

He has more than lived up to that name as the graduate student recipient of the Marion Luther Brittain Award, considered the highest honor presented to an Emory University student.

After experiencing trauma and burnout as a newly minted ICU nurse during the COVID-19 pandemic, Razmpour decided to return to school for an advanced degree. His goal: find ways to improve working conditions for hospital nurses on the frontlines of caregiving.

"I want to build better support systems so nurses don't have to go through what I went through," says Razmpour, who is graduating with a PhD from Laney Graduate School and the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and an MBA from Goizueta Business School.

As he gained new knowledge, both in clinical nursing and business, Razmpour immediately applied it. He is leading the development and deployment of innovative, comprehensive methods to support Emory Healthcare's workforce analytics and nursing advocacy efforts.

"Omid's work is not just benefitting Emory Healthcare, it will have an enduring impact on the entire nursing profession," says Sharon Pappas, professor at Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and chief nurse executive at Emory Healthcare. "It's pretty amazing what he's doing."

An inspiring family

Razmpour's father, Bahman Razmpour, was just 14 when his parents sent him to live with his older brother in the United States so that he would have a better life.

"My dad didn't know any English when he started high school in Iowa," Razmpour says. "After class, he worked as a janitor in the high school to cover his living expenses."

He went on to become a successful entrepreneur, owning restaurants and developing commercial real estate.

His mother, Margaret Devaney, has owned and managed a successful paper supply company for 36 years.

Razmpour's decision to become a nurse was influenced by an aunt who loved her job as a nurse midwife and an uncle who enjoyed his work as a nurse anesthesiologist.

"Physicians are touted as the healers in our society but nurses are the ones who are caring for people minute-by-minute," Razmpour says. "I wanted a hands-on career where I could work closely with people."

Making a difference

He majored in nursing as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Clair, and did a summer internship in an intensive care unit at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.

"I decided that my passion was working in the ICU," Razmpour says. "You can see how things change almost immediately. You give IV meds and see the result in the patient."

He also found it rewarding to "fill in communication gaps" between physicians and patients. "Often in the ICU, a big team of physicians and physician assistants will stand over a patient laying in a bed to explain procedures," Razmpour says. "I would stand quietly in the corner and listen. When the physicians would leave, I would pull up a chair, sit next to the bed and explain everything in layman's terms to the patient and their families. It's a human-centered way to reduce anxiety and fear."

He graduated with his bachelor's in nursing science in May 2020 and the University of Minnesota Medical Center offered him a full-time ICU position.

"I had landed my dream job," Razmpour recalls thinking.

From dream job to nightmare

The timing, however, could not have been worse. It was early in the COVID-19 pandemic and ICUs around the world were filled with the sickest of the COVID-19 patients.

Some patients were on ventilators while others were on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machines which act as artificial lungs, pumping and oxygenating the blood outside of the body to allow the heart and lungs to rest.

As a new nurse, untrained on ECMO, Razmpour was assigned COVID-19 patients who were too sick even for these life-support systems. "I was just helping them die, essentially," he recalls. His patients remained unconscious for the most part.

The patients' family members, however, still wanted to see their loved ones via Facetime. "I would try to position the iPad in a way to try to make the family's view less sad than it inevitably was," Razmpour says.

He worked the 12-hour overnight shift, from 7 p.m.-7 a.m. "I was living in the basement of my mother's house," he says. "I would come home from work, take off my clothes, shower and crash."

Plastic was taped over the bottom of the basement door leading to the rest of the house, to protect others from possible infection. No COVID-19 vaccine was available at the time. "I remember feeling a lot of loneliness," Razmpour says. "I was going through this terrible time, experiencing really horrible things, and I was also cut off from friends and family."

In November 2020 the pandemic spiked. "On our unit, multiple patients were dying on every shift," Razmpour says. "I came into nursing to try to heal and support people, but what I found was hopelessness and inevitable death."

He started having trouble sleeping, experienced heart palpitations and lost his appetite.

When he asked for mental-health support at the hospital, he learned he would have to wait three months for a session with a therapist. The delay was due to a backlog of appointments for the many health care workers who were also struggling.

"I couldn't take care of myself, much less the patients, and I saw no light at the end of the tunnel," Razmpour recalls. "I lost hope in the nursing profession and I quit in January 2021."

Rekindling hope

Razmpour's mother helped him move forward.

"My mom is the kind of person who really wants to help you find your way," he says. "She allowed me to take my time to grieve and recover. When I started to get my energy back, she served as my sounding board. Sometimes you just need someone to listen to you."

Razmpour decided to return to nursing school for a PhD. "I loved the idea of making an impact by researching ways to improve conditions for nurses," he says.

Emory proved an ideal match. Razmpour received a prestigious Woodruff Fellowship and felt an instant connection when he met with two Emory faculty who served as his mentors: Pappas and Jeannie Cimiotti, associate professor in the School of Nursing.

"They both encouraged me to chart my own path," Razmpour says.

"I felt so fortunate to have Omid as a PhD student," Pappas says. "It was a real gift. He came with so much passion. I saw someone with incredible curiosity and a real drive to make things better."

Zeroing in on nurse retention

Razmpour reasoned that the best way to get hospitals to strengthen support for nurses was to calculate the financial costs of nurse turnover. With the support of Pappas, he gathered financial and human resources data from Emory Healthcare and conducted interviews with nurse managers and other leaders.

"I wanted to understand every touchpoint in the work trajectory of a nurse, from recruitment, to onboarding, orientation, training and length of service," Razmpour says.

While working on his PhD, Razmpour also enrolled in Goizueta Business School's MBA program to take his research to the next level.

"I needed to better understand business and financial analytics," he explains, "so that I could promote change by speaking the language of those who allocate resources."

He found another valuable mentor in Donald Lee, associate professor of information systems and operations management at Goizueta.

Razmpour developed the RETAIN Framework (Retention, Evaluation and Turnover Analysis for the Investment in Nursing), a proprietary method to quantify the true financial and operational impacts of nurse turnover. Working in partnership with Emory Healthcare, his team also created the Nursing Workforce Analytics (NWA) platform to transform nursing workforce management from reactive crisis response into proactive, data-driven decision support.

The RETAIN Framework and NWA were successfully deployed as pilots at Emory Healthcare and are now set for full implementation.

"The RETAIN Framework helped us to determine the direct cost of registered nurse turnover," Pappas says. "Previously, that cost had only been estimated. The NWA was the next logical step. It tells us how we can use the dollars we saved to prevent nursing turnover."

The analytical tools Razmpour developed "are a vital contribution to the nursing profession," she adds.

Razmpour's work was noticed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, which offered him a year-long, visiting PhD fellowship to further advance his nursing workforce analytics project.

Launching a business

Razmpour encountered yet another life-changing mentor in Brian Cayce, managing director of Goizueta's Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

"I thought I was going to be a health care administrator," Razmpour says, "but Brian Cayce opened my eyes to the idea that I could do something independently. I realized that I could innovate more quickly and make changes at a larger scale by starting a business."

He formed a team consisting of Lee and two Goizueta alumni: Sokol Tushe, who is on the faculty of the University of South Florida; and Tyki Wada, who works fulltime on the NWA project as a software engineer at Emory Healthcare.

They are in the process of forming a company in partnership with Emory Healthcare, WorkforceIQ, to continue refining and developing advanced analytical tools to support nurses.

"We want to provide ways to holistically look at each and every nurse, not as a number on a spreadsheet but as a person deserving of the resources they need to do their job well," Razmpour says.

Looking back at the unpredictable turns in his life, Razmpour says he wouldn't choose a different path, not even to avoid the darkest moments he endured as an ICU nurse during the pandemic.

"If I hadn't gone through that experience," he says, "I wouldn't be where I am today."