Net Health Webinar Talks About Reporting Needs for Employee Health and Occupational Medicine Facilities

Employee Health (EH) and Occupational Medicine (OccMed) reporting gives hospitals and other organizations the information they need to ensure their employees stay safe and healthy on the job.

Tracking workplace illnesses, injuries, and exposures is more critical than ever. Accurate and timely reporting has become nearly impossible for staff using paper or legacy methods such as spreadsheets. Reporting software is now vital for the future of workplace health and wellness, as well as staying compliant with local, state, and national health regulations.

In late February, Net Health hosted Part 1 of a webinar about Reporting Needs for Employee Health and Occupational Medicine Facilities” to address these issues. Below you’ll find information and recommendations from this event, including how Net Health’s intuitive dashboard makes it easier than ever to generate detailed reports.

Maintain Compliance With Software Solutions

Since 2015, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has updated reporting requirements to mandate faster communication and increased data collection.¹ The COVID-19 pandemic added exponentially to those responsibilities. As a result, specialized OccMed solutions have evolved to make tasks such as new hire processing, exposure protocols, and employee surveillance tracking more manageable. 

For example, the webinar discussed how Net Health’s occupational health manager software can track a wide array of events, including injury and worker’s compensation claims, health services provided to employees, surveillance and compliance data, work restrictions, visit costs, and modified duty reports. Managers can sort by specialized parameters to get a bird’s eye view of their staff or drill down to get more granular data. For example, surveillance and compliance tracking can show data about hearing conservation tests, pulmonary function tests, drug test summaries, and an employee’s surveillance history, including information about no-shows and cancellations.  

Occupational health software can help put injury and worker’s compensation data into better perspective by allowing managers to run reports by specific injuries and/or illness, the amount of time lost, incident details, or even multiple injury patients. Employers can also generate data about workers treated at OccMed clinics, pulling up individual employee files or viewing injuries and illness by job class or department. Net Health’s software also allows sorting by visit category, provider, and diagnosis.

Track Employee Health Reporting at Hospitals

Employee Health departments tracking medical staff compliance have strict reporting guidelines. In addition to OccMed categories, hospitals also need to ensure staff compliance with multiple vaccinations (or exemptions), including hepatitis, TB, varicella, influenza, mumps, measles, and rubella. 

The recent webinar noted how hospital employee health reporting is also necessary for bloodborne pathogen protocols (BPP), which require recording exposure to HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C and any post-exposure follow-up tests. It’s too much for any small department or EH nurse to keep track of without the help of software. 

Software from Net Health can not only track compliance but provide granular detail. For example, an exposure analysis report can include whether or not it was OSHA reportable, if an incident resulted in hospitalization or fatality, the cost of treatment (even if it’s not billed out), whether the incident was related to any specific equipment or medical devices, as well as other specific information about the employees involved. Injuries and illnesses can be tracked by the nature of the incident, the body part affected, the root cause, severity, diagnosis, the attending physician, the clinic visited, and the employee’s department unit. 

Modify Compliance Parameters

For COVID19, surveillance and compliance reporting are at the front of everyone’s mind as it poses the most challenges because not only do the rules change without much warning but so do the definitions of what counts as “fully vaccinated.”

One of Net Health’s strengths is that it allows health managers to define medical staff compliance in a way that suits their situation. In some hospitals and clinics, that may involve receiving just the primary series of vaccines. In others, it may include a booster shot. The ability to define the parameters of what it means to be compliant as well as store information about the specifics of vaccines (including the brand and expiration dates) and information about refusals and waivers helps paint a complete picture of compliance for government reporting and overall assessment of health and wellness within a facility. 

Would you like to see our reporting features in action? Access the webinar below.

References:

 ¹ Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), “Updates to OSHA’s Reporting and Recordkeeping Rule: An Overview,” September 2014.