As employers continue struggling to navigate the impacts of COVID-19, we’ve quickly moved to support our current customers by addressing top challenges with new technology.

Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) leaders across the industry have scrambled to establish systems for tracking the outbreak of this infectious disease, managing the Coronavirus cases for isolation and recovery, quarantining and monitoring personnel, and following rapidly shifting government guidelines for those returning to working environments.

Out of necessity, much of this work and coordination have happened remotely...and that’s if operations haven’t ground to a halt completely.

The top organizational challenges we’ve identified are (1) lack of preparedness for infectious disease outbreak, (2) inability to collect and provide data on pandemic cases and exposure risk, and (3) insufficient systems for confronting fast-evolving regulatory protocols.

Infectious Disease Tracking Tool

As the Coronavirus pandemic began to impact organizations, many EHS leaders turned to the tools at hand to develop systems for infectious disease case management within the employee population. This meant identifying new resources to match the tracking and reporting need, adapting outdated software like MS Excel, or deploying several different pieces of technology to achieve the end result. The internal time and energy spent to establish these systems is immeasurable, all for what many have characterized as an imperfect output.

Early on, as the pandemic spread, there were no ready software options built expressly for COVID-19 infectious disease case management.

Our new Infectious Disease Tracking Tool was built to support organizations of any size working to effectively track and report on the impact of Coronavirus among the employee base. In this time of unprecedented crisis response, this tool provides business leaders with real-time intelligence on COVID-19 cases within the employee population.

This is how it helps:

• Worker registration of COVID-19 status
• Worker symptoms logging
• Direct notification to management of symptomatic colleagues
• Push alerts and policy updates to your workforce
• Report on the number of COVID-19 cases and case status within organizational units
• Reporting for employees in quarantine or self-isolation

Through a simple online form, your employees may safely report:

• Confirmed COVID-19 cases
• Specific symptoms
• Suspected cases
• Voluntary isolation
• Exposure to affected persons
• Employees may also log when they believe exposure occurred, treatment status, exposure risks they’ve presented through common interaction, and location.

All of this data feeds into management’s central, real-time dashboard, for tracking, reporting, and taking action on COVID-19 and case management decisions.

Also, the Infectious Disease Tracking tool allows you to assign corrective actions. For example, when employees self-report a suspected case of COVID-19, you may assign an action to self-isolate for a period of time, or seek treatment, etc.

TRACKING COVID-19 ACROSS THE GLOBE

We’ve also developed a dashboard that tracks global COVID-19 cases, to support strategic decision-making for organizations with international business ties. From your central Dashboard, you’re able to drill down by state and country for statistics—updated every 10 minutes—from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO).

DATA & REPORTING

Employees use simple, pre-built online forms, created by EHS experts. Each submission pushes data to your central Dashboard immediately, for an uncomplicated, point-in-time look at COVID-19 organizational impact. Since the creation of this tool was strongly informed by existing customers, the information populating the form covers the full spectrum of need for most workplaces and employee populations.

Here are the data types displayed in the Infectious Disease Tracking Dashboard:

• Number of new cases
• Number of suspected cases
• Number of active confirmed cases
• Number of recovered cases
• Employee isolation status: voluntary, quarantine, not isolated
• Number of hospitalizations
• Cases by location
• Cases by stage: suspected, confirmed, recovered
• All open cases
• You can drill down into each data set for granular reporting, insights, or corrective action assignments.

WELLNESS SCREENING

For essential employees, those entering and exiting diverse work environments on a daily basis, minimizing the risk of exposure is critical, along with closely monitoring health symptoms. Many employers have no system in place for this activity, but the practice is growing for organizations across the country, seeking to take every precaution now—some businesses are now requiring wellness screening for all employees. Screening workers for COVID-19 symptoms and logging the activity helps establish a benchmark for workforce health that can be monitored. This protocol is also a highly anticipated potential regulatory building block and may prove to be a requirement for organizations working toward early recovery, alongside of appropriate documentation.

Our Wellness Screening tool provides employers the ability to track and screen their workforce, and require employees to do a self-assessment for COVID-19. This tool enables businesses to lower the risk of exposure and spread of infectious disease at their facilities, supporting continuity of operations. Wellness Screening compliments the Infectious Disease Tracking tool by offering another proactive reporting measure, that build efficacy in the data stream, and by connecting screening outputs with the Infectious Disease Tracking tool.

Here’s how the Wellness Screening Tool works:

• Select from two screenings: Wellness Assessment & Self-Assessment
• Select from your unique list of locations from a drop-down menu
• Select an employee (employees find their name for a self-assessment)

Then, answer a series of yes/no questions:

• Has the worker been previously evaluated for return to work?
• Is body temperature withing in an acceptable range?
• Does the employee present a number of symptoms associated with Coronavirus?
• Has the worker been exposed to COVID-19 through contact with a suspected or confirmed case?
• Has the employee been in contact with anyone who presents a high risk of exposure by nature of their profession?
• Has the worker visited environments presenting a high risk of exposure?
• Etc.

You can take action on this form record by recommending quarantine or medical review, or clear the employee to return to work. Designations for quarantine or medical review may require additional follow-up: notes on observations and execution, length of quarantine time, etc.

A signature is required to complete the form submission, using a simple mouse. Completed wellness screenings generate a risk characterization for each individual response, which is useful for showing trends in aggregate. Reporting options are numerous, simple to access from your Dashboard, and display data in a number of ways.

WORK FROM HOME TOOL

The remote worker mass migration has impacted nearly every organization, thanks to quarantine restrictions. Sending workers home creates new challenges for EHS leaders; office environments are typically friendlier than makeshift home offices, which often lack the right basic equipment to support productivity, minimize injuries from repetitive stress, and mitigate worker fatigue.

The Work From Home tool was created to simplify the major IT challenges of supporting remote workers, along with tracking on-the-job incidents that happen at home. This tool also offers ergonomic self-assessments, enabling safer, healthier, more productive remote work.

The Work From Home Tool offers:

• Management oversight of remote workers
• Employee self-assessments for home office environments, including hazard identification and ergonomic situation
• Employee log of incidents and hazards away from work
• Employee requests for home office equipment, with management approval/review

The Work From Home App mobile form offers your employees:

• Ergonomic self-check for remote work environments
• Reporting of work-related incidents
• Reporting of remote work environment hazards
• Equipment requisitions supporting remote work
• Related corrective actions
• Work From Home App

Learn more about infectious disease in the workplace.