About Us
Healthcare Innovation is in our Blood
The Morel Company™ was founded in 2011 to reduce and eliminate the obvious and not so obvious challenges associated with traditional patient boosting.
This physically demanding, time-consuming task is performed by the typical bedside nurse 10+ times each shift, requiring more than an hour of their time. This burden significantly contributes to job dissatisfaction and burnout and is a leading reason nurses leave bedside care and their profession. For the patient, the act of being boosted up-in-bed is uncomfortable, unsafe and an embarrassing experience.
Innovation has been a hallmark of successful healthcare companies and has been a passion of my family for nearly a century. It started with my grandfather, William A. Hillenbrand, who was a visionary in the healthcare industry and started the Hillrom Company in 1927. His inspirations around making patients comfortable and reducing the burden on the nurse led to the development of many innovative products that fulfilled his dreams and vision. This healthcare innovation continued in my family with W August ‘Gus’ Hillenbrand, my father. He truly believed and always focused on the development of groundbreaking products that would ease the burden for caregivers and improve outcomes for patients.
Now, at The Morel Company, we continue to use my family’s passion for innovation to address caregiver and patient issues. Accordingly, we developed The Hercules Patient Repositioning System, an innovative product that allows a single caregiver to boost a patient weighing up to 750 lbs. up-in-bed with the simple push of a button. The benefits of The Hercules Patient Repositioning System are far-reaching. For the caregiver, it eliminates an exhausting, burdensome and unsafe task all while saving over an hour of time per bedside caregiver during each shift. For the patient, Hercules improves comfort and protects their dignity, therefore, creating an overall better hospitalization experience.
In the future, The Morel Company will continue these principles of innovation, continuous improvement and commitment to customer satisfaction, clearly aimed at positively impacting the careers of caregivers and the hospitalization experience for patients.
On a more personal note, The Morel Company’s name is a tribute to my grandfather. He had many passions in life, one of which was spending time outdoors. Whatever the season, he was always with family and friends, picking blackberries, gathering walnuts or hunting his favorite treasure, the Morel mushroom.
William A. Hillenbrand II
President & CEO