Limitations of Typical Assessments
To ensure staff are health and ready for work, home health agencies are surveying their employees on a regular basis amid the pandemic. Assessments are extremely valuable as agencies ask employees to self-report symptoms and situations which may mean they are potentially at-risk. Based on the assessment results, the agency can determine the next steps to managing the employee’s situation and determine whether or not further testing may be needed for colleagues and patients who may have been in contact with the employee.
Initially, the process has been manual with agency administrators texting or calling each of their staff members to fill out a return-to-work (“RTW”) assessment on a daily basis. Administrators would then track the responses on spreadsheets. This process quickly became time-consuming and cumbersome for agency leaders and employees.
Strengths of Automated Assessments
Home health agencies now use telehealth to automate the process and easily conduct daily RTW assessments with their staff. With Synzi’s assessments tool, agency administrators can automatically send a digital RTW questionnaire every day to every staff member. The digital process saves considerable time and effort while enabling agencies to better identify and manage staff who are at risk for infection due to their symptoms and activities.
Synzi’s platform helps agencies:
- Access employees before they leave home each day to reduce exposure
- Communicate across geographic and organizational boundaries
- Automate and centralize reporting
- Send out intervention alerts based on assessment responses
- Increase productivity by assessing team remotely and adjusting scheduling as needed
- Provide employee instruction from a safe distance
- Identify and reengage at-risk employees to reduce absenteeism
Agency administrators can use a range of questions types (e.g., single choice, multiple choice, yes/no, rating, and text entry) in their survey design in order to obtain critical employee data in the most efficient manner. Synzi’s HIPAA-compliant communication features help agencies enable contact tracing to quickly identify and notify other employees who may have come in contact with the infected individual. As a result, agencies can gain insight into their employees’ risk of infection and transmission on a timely basis and act accordingly on behalf of the health of their employees and their patients.