It’s no question that as COVID-19 began to spread throughout the U.S. earlier this year, the workplace as we know it — for both employees and employers — was shaken. Employees were fraught with questions about working from home while caring for families, and employers faced the unknown of ensuring safety of their teams while meeting business goals — all in a new environment and with little foresight into the market.
The idea for Scientific Technologies Corporation’s (STChealth) SAFE Return to Work program was born out of this universal challenge: How can businesses support employee health and provide teams with confidence in returning to the physical workplace?
As an organization focused on transforming public health through their software solutions and immunization informatics, STChealth explains its social purpose with the inspirational mantra, “Intelligent solutions for a healthier future.” Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, pharmacies and healthcare providers across the country depended on STChealth’s solutions to administer immunizations and lab tests to customers at the point of care. As the coronavirus pandemic began uprooting normal ways of life, STChealth partnered with Nerdery and other leading organizations to develop a program to help businesses leverage STChealth’s national testing infrastructure for the purposes of safely reopening workplaces.
A universal need for guidance
Most organizations don’t plan for a global pandemic, and as a result need guidance and expertise related to safely reopening workplaces. The federal government continues to release updated guidelines for returning to work, and some individual states are releasing their own guidelines that add additional regulations for businesses. All of this creates a confusing and stressful situation for both business leaders and employees.
STChealth needed a comprehensive solution that could accomplish the goals of bringing employees back to work, decreasing pandemic-related anxiety, tracking and maintaining test results and communicating throughout an organization. As a long-time partner of STChealth, Nerdery was trusted to integrate stakeholders through fast-moving, collaborative product development.
Building workplace confidence and communication
SAFE Return to Work makes the reopening process simple with step-by-step instructions for screening and testing employees, complying with social distancing guidelines, and supporting employee emotional health. The technology leverages the STChealth platform and network that includes over 100 million patients, 45,000 healthcare providers, pharmacy, and health system locations across the country and includes employee mobile access, clinical reporting and employer dashboards.
The SAFE program has four fundamental components that can be tailored for organizations’ unique needs:
- Test and Trace: Screen employees before they enter the workplace with an easy-to-use mobile-friendly solution. Provide employees with digital payment cards for FDA-authorized COVID-19 tests and track results and overall workplace immunity in real-time dashboards.
- Workplace Wellbeing: Help employees manage COVID-19 by providing resources for related anxiety, including family stress, worksite concerns and financial hardship to improve overall employee quality of life and ultimately, individual productivity.
- Culture Creation: Turnkey executive and HR management considerations for new social standards while at work, along with step-by-step policies for reopening safely.
- Continuing Communications: Digital access to resources to keep the workforce protected and up-to-date on COVID-19, designed to inform while reducing fear.
With easily-adaptable technology at its core, the solution has been quickly implemented within multiple and diverse industries such as airports, banking and mining. The results of the SAFE program, when activating these components, provides businesses the tools to protect and prioritize their most valuable assets: their people.
Working together for the health of all
SAFE Return to Work is the perfect example of innovation in the face of adversity. COVID-19 has created myriad challenges for everyone, but workplace safety doesn’t have to be one of them. The reopening process can be simple — helping businesses return to a state of normalcy while supporting employees’ emotional and physical health.
To learn more about SAFE Return to Work or to implement it at your organization, visit https://stchealth.com/employer/.
