By Page Thompson, Director of Employee Health & Safety at Propelus
Hospitals and many other healthcare organizations have a huge responsibility in caring for thousands of patients each week. In this fast-paced environment, tracking hospital employee health compliance is essential—not just for regulatory reasons but for protecting the health and safety of both patients and staff. With a large workforce to manage, hospital employee health compliance tracking can seem daunting, but setting up the right processes can make it manageable and even straightforward.
In this article, we share some best practices for hospital employee health compliance tracking and how technology can simplify the process, ensuring a safer, more compliant workforce.
Understanding Employee Health Compliance in Hospitals and Other Organizations
As a hospital or healthcare organization leader, you must ensure you fully understand the health compliance, regulatory bodies, and organizational standards impacting your work. The Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector (OIG) resources are a good place to start, and we recommend reviewing the General Compliance Program Guidance (GCPG) for information about compliance program infrastructure and federal laws. Regarding the critical metrics for your employees, you must keep up-to-date with their vaccination status, Tuberculosis (TB) testing, and drug screenings. These all must be carried out regularly and recorded so you can refer back to them, as required.
Accurate and up-to-date records give you a reference point for new and existing employees, support you in case of an incident in your organization, and provide essential information for your compliance. The more data you can store and update regularly about your employees, the easier it will be to ensure you are in compliance at all times and avoid significant challenges or incidents within your workplace.
Centralized Compliance Tracking
Using one platform to centralize and store all of your employee health data offers you many benefits. Your employee health and leadership teams will know exactly where they can find any data they require, and it will be quicker and easier than ever to find the information they need. Centralized data simplifies reporting and makes it easier to present information for audits. Human error is a big concern when dealing with such a large amount of data, but automating these processes with software such as Immuware by Propelus can help. Automation helps to reduce human error and save time, allowing you to remain in compliance without feeling overwhelmed by the huge amount of work required for employee health compliance tracking.
Real-Time Monitoring and Alerting
One of the biggest mistakes we see hospitals and healthcare organizations make when it comes to health compliance tracking is thinking this is a one-and-done job. Real-time monitoring and regular updates and searches are required to remain in compliance. Monitoring employee compliance with required surveillances is an essential on-going activity that must be done in a timely fashion. We recommend setting up automated alerts for upcoming deadlines to help you remain compliant. The software can offer reminders for annual screenings or updates to vaccinations so you don’t forget any critical deadlines that could put your employees or patients at risk.
Employee Self-Reporting and Portal Access
A good way to keep on top of your employee health compliance tracking is to encourage your team to use self-reporting tools. There are many advantages of empowering your employees in this way, from significant time savings for the clinical staff to ease of access to desired information for employees. Employee portals can help streamline the process of updating health status records and make it quicker and easier for both your employee health team and your employees to keep their health status up to date. Enabling employees the ability to upload a copy of their offsite proof of vaccination themselves frees up valuable clinical time and expedites compliance goal achievement.
Integration with Existing Systems
If you already use an effective system for HR processes or payroll within your workplace, you can integrate your compliance software with this system. Immuware integrates with various applications to enable data exchange and achieve compliance faster. This integration helps to eliminate duplication while ensuring consistent data flow across departments. It’s essential for large hospitals dealing with a huge amount of data that require sharing across various teams.
Healthcare organizations across the country can follow the best practices we’ve shared above to better track hospital employee health compliance. By implementing automated systems to help support this task, you can ensure you don’t miss deadlines, remain compliant with upcoming audits, and protect your organization and employees from unnecessary risk..
To help improve your compliance efforts, we highly recommend using Immuware within your organization. Immuware is the leading employee health platform that accelerates compliance up to 40% faster, from onboarding through annual requirements. Healthcare organizations can streamline compliance by tracking employee health records, ensuring a safe and healthy workplace. Contact us today to discuss improving your employee health compliance tracking processes.
