Occupational health, and the safety of employees in hospitals, is a matter that not only touches on employee morale, but also OSHA compliance. Healthcare providers need to create a work environment that’s safe and conducive for their employees, volunteers, contract employees and students. Let’s look at three proven ways that hospitals can streamline employee health management to enhance safety, productivity and compliance in the workplace.
1. Invest in Employee Health Software
One of the surest ways to enhance employee safety and health in the workplace is to invest in a robust and supported employee health software solution for your hospital. Conventional ways of managing health issues (manual reports and spreadsheets) are not good enough—nor, do they meet the dynamic challenges of the modern hospital environment. Employee health clinicians are taking up more responsibilities and encountering different situations on a daily basis. Without a robust employee health software solution, it becomes difficult to track incidents, exposures, immunizations and injuries/illnesses. The ability to meaningfully communicate these indicators to hospital management and key stakeholders is onerous without a comprehensive reporting system.
A specialized software solution manages your hospital’s population through improved communication and medical record accuracy while promoting better collaboration and coordination. Specialized software enables the employee health clinicians to automate medical surveillance and to enforce workplace compliance issues like required screenings and vaccinations. It becomes easier to manage cases and return-to-work programs—ultimately reducing the cost of sick days, absences, and presenteeism.
2. Expand Employee Health Services
Research shows that the challenges, demands, and complexity of working in a healthcare setting have a significant  impact on workplace safety and risks that employees are exposed to daily. To curb the challenges and demands that the modern healthcare environment presents, health providers ought to expand the health services by providing comprehensive health coverage and preventive services to their employees. Research shows that inclusion of evidence-based clinical preventive services as well as lifestyle modification to employee health programs improves both health and productivity.
Employers who expand health services create a win-win situation, which allows them to maintain a healthy and motivated workforce that performs better on the job, spend less sick time and require less medical care than workers with health problems. Simple things such as providing screenings for high blood pressure or breast cancer, adult immunizations, and facilitating lifestyle modification to quit smoking or lose weight go a long way in helping your staff become and remain healthy. The payoff is optimal physical health as well as psychological health among employees. The outcome is not just healthy employees, but a happy staff that becomes more attracted to their jobs as they feel their employer truly values them.
3. Ensuring Compliance with OSHA
Aside from investing in employee health software and providing incentives to employees, it’s also critical for health providers to ensure compliance at all levels. The best way to enforce compliance within a hospital environment is to implement an electronic health record (or a specialized documentation and tracking system) that drives consistency in data collection and retrieval, security of information and thoroughness of reports.
Employee-specific software solutions drive consistency that generalized hospital information systems do not. They support features such as schedules, reminders, and tracking which are key in handling employee safety and compliance tasks. Whether you have a large workforce, or just a dozen employees, a specialized employee health software solution empowers you to protect and secure health data and occupational data from a central point. The need to protect and secure personal health information (PHI) from occupationally-related data in a single patient-centric record in crucial and not supported by most general EHRs. Some additional benefits of having an employee-centric system are:
- Easily access employee information
- Fast and accurate data entry & retrieval of health records
- Real-time and system-wide reporting
- Reduced time and elimination of double data entries
- Dramatically reduce, or eliminate paper filing
- No need to distribute and collect forms
- Information kept intact
- Quick-print access to reports and forms
Bottom line, an employee’s health and safety is critical in creating a productive work environment in hospitals and ensuring OSHA compliance. Health providers can enhance workplace safety and productivity by expanding health services available to their health system’s population, implementing an employee health software solution, and ensuring compliance in how employee-centric data and health information is handled and stored.
Start organizing your entire employee health program by turning to AgilityEH™, the leading employee health software, brought to you by Net Health. AgilityEH is designed to meet your program’s specific needs, providing the tools you need to protect and secure personal information while staying on top of your organization’s OSHA compliance. AgilityEH can expand to include the comprehensive functionality of a Meaningful Use certified EMR. For simple solutions that streamline your day-to-day operation and help build your bottom line, turn to Net Health for all of your healthcare software needs.