What's Your Employee’s Health In This Flu And COVID Season?

Employee Health (EH) departments face new responsibilities and challenges as the COVID pandemic and flu season collide. Keeping track of new vaccinations and boosters in addition to recording flu shots, exposure reporting, and post-exposure follow-ups can leave staff feeling overwhelmed.

Paper methods, spreadsheets, and other legacy systems just can’t help them keep up with changing reporting and compliance requirements. That’s why experts from Net Health recently addressed ways to digitize records, easily track compliance, and automate reporting in a webinar titled, “What’s Your Employee’s Health In This Flu and COVID Season?”

Here are a few of the software tools available to help EH departments improve workflows:

Mobile Immunization Tracking

Net Health Employee Health’s proprietary web-based MIT platform makes compliance easy by pulling Vaccine Information Sheets (VIS) directly from the CDC and auto-populating fields with staff vaccine data. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and ensures the accuracy of important public health records. Because the platform is a mobile solution, it can be used at any employer location or clinic, and it can be programmed to route vaccine data directly to state registries on behalf of EH staff.

With MIT, EH staff can simply scan employee badges at mobile clinics to accurately record ID information and vaccination administration or historical data, while mobile device cameras capture photos of vaccine data for uploading to the system’s pre-populated forms. Confirmation can even be sent automatically to patients for their own records on the spot. Information entered into MIT can then be automatically uploaded into Net Health Employee Health software without any effort from the user.

Automated Reporting

It’s time-consuming to run reports, but EH departments can now automate many of these tasks with the right software tools. Net Health Employee Health populates reports with predetermined parameters and can auto-run those reports daily, weekly, or monthly. This is true of data of flu and COVID cases as well as OSHA’s 24-hour incident reporting requirements for severe injuries.

Health data lives in an organization’s intranet, but it can also be made available to state registries and reporting clearinghouses such as Iron Bridge. Auto-reporting health information keeps departments in compliance with changing compliance regulations without EH employees having to constantly keep track of submissions.

Dashboards for Impactful Visualization

Dashboards are a powerful tool that allows EH departments to visualize data in a way that’s intuitive to understand and easy to communicate. The software tools allow EH staff to view illnesses and injuries, compliance gaps, productivity, and even estimated costs and savings.

The graphs and charts in Net Health Employee Health’s web-based dashboard can even allow EH managers to view flu and COVID compliance by divisions, job classes, etc. Employees can rest easy knowing that dashboard data is de-identified when showing data trends.

Employee and Manager Portals

Communication can be challenging during the pandemic, and EH employees don’t have time to track down hospital staff to ensure compliance with hospital and public health regulations. But Net Health Employee Health’s portals give EH departments and employees alike a place to access crucial information easily.

Employee/Manager portals can give EH departments access to data on compliance, case management, and even take a look at past and upcoming employee visits to flu and COVID clinics. Because the system sends automatic reminders to staff, EH can also use portals to record communications – such as reminders – to provide proof that they sent documentation on time.

Net Health Employee Health’s powerful employee portals are a convenient way for hospital staff to access their medical information and immunization records, request vaccine or testing appointments, complete paperwork ahead of time, and report incidents (in their own words). This takes the pressure off of EH departments since employees can go through the intuitive portal instead of talking to, calling, or emailing EH staff to take care of these tasks for them.

Tracking Employee Health During Flu and COVID Season

When flu season is compounded by the COVID pandemic and new reporting and compliance requirements, it’s only natural to need new tools to manage these new responsibilities. Net Health’s software suite provides ways for Organization Leaders, Compliance Managers, Infection Preventionists, and Employee Health Nurses to work together to ensure employees stay healthy during this COVID and flu season.

Let us show you how it works in our webinar below.