How COVIDCheck Colorado administers 300,000 vaccines with Workforce.com

OVERVIEW

With 55 testing sites and over 2,000 frontline workers across their entire state, the role COVIDCheck Colorado had in returning local communities back to the workforce cannot be overstated.

“We started COVIDCheck Colorado as a response to what we saw across the state of Colorado … half a million people out of work, a million kids who could no longer be in school in person,” shared Eric Parrie, CEO of COVIDCheck Colorado.

CHALLENGE

The sheer scope of COVIDCheck Colorado’s operation presented all kinds of logistical hurdles. Administering vaccines and tests to thousands of people takes an enormous amount of backend planning that often gets overlooked. “Solving workforce management was a priority because our workforce was the heart of our entire operation,” said Parrie.

It is critical that emergency response teams are able to perform tasks quickly and respond to changes immediately. COVIDCheck Colorado wanted to ensure its frontline workers had the ability to fully focus on optimizing patient outcomes even in the face of crisis. To do this, management needed to limit the headaches that come from inefficient scheduling and attendance tracking.

“[Our clinical professionals] couldn’t be worrying about who was going to be showing up on-site and when. They needed a set of tools that would solve that problem before they came into contact with the first of thousands of patients, in a given day,” Parrie explained.

SOLUTION

COVIDCheck Colorado partnered with Workforce.com to streamline different areas of their workforce management to become more agile and productive. By consolidating scheduling, time and attendance, and healthcare compliance into a single cloud-based platform, both managers and employees alike were better able to provide care for thousands of people across Colorado.

RESULTS

COVIDCheck Colorado administered over 800,000 tests and 300,000 vaccines to local communities, helping them return to regular life. “Without Workforce.com, we wouldn’t have been able to run our vaccine sites,” said Emily Baron, Chief Public Health Officer at COVIDCheck Colorado. “It is an integral part of being able to understand what staffing levels we needed across all of our vaccines sites and how those staffing levels needed to be adjusted over time based on metrics and number of doses we were allocating.”

Here are some of the processes that Workforce.com made more efficient for COVIDCheck Colorado:

Improving patient outcomes

With improved insight into time and attendance data, COVIDCheck Colorado could optimize their labor costs; this, in turn, allowed them to increase investment into improving patient outcomes.

“When we optimize our labor costs, we’re able to provide more resources to our sites to run them right from an operational perspective, and test or vaccinate as many people as we can in the community,” says site optimization director Carrasquillo.

These higher testing and vaccination rates are critical for the success of some of COVIDCheck Colorado’s underlying performance indicators like reduced vaccine hesitancy and increased positive word of mouth about vaccination throughout the state.

Optimizing staff levels across multiple vaccination sites

COVIDCheck Colorado vaccination sites had varying needs in terms of medical staff; deploying the required number of health workers quickly to the locations that needed them was essential.

With a live time clock feed and push notifications, managers could easily see on one platform gaps in staffing across all their sites, allowing them to dispatch qualified workers wherever and whenever they were needed.

Complying with medical requirements

Managers can now apply qualification tags to specific employees, making it easier to assess which employees are medically certified to work in certain roles.

“Vaccination sites are very particular about the credentials that someone has to have in order to vaccinate,” says Carrasquillo. “If we didn’t have that in Workforce.com, that would put us in a big compliance risk if someone were performing duties that they weren’t actually medically certified to be able to do.”

The PREP Act grants licensed healthcare professionals, healthcare students and recent medical retirees immunity from liability when administering vaccines. However, the CDC still recommends licensed workers complete comprehensive training. With qualification tags in place, Workforce.com automatically prevents managers from scheduling unqualified workers for shifts that require proper certification. Workforce.com also helps managers keep track of when their employees need to complete important training regiments.

Faster and paperless timesheet approval

With improved attendance tracking and seamless payroll software integration, timesheet approval became quite simple. This translated to a decrease in time spent on administrative tasks and an increase in employee satisfaction and productivity.

“Our staff members, our site staff, and our site leadership are all able to actually approve timesheets online. I don’t have to wait for somebody to respond to me in Slack or in an email, they can just go into Workforce.com and approve somebody’s time,” shared Elizabeth Watts, COVIDCheck Colorado’s payroll administrator.

Centralized data and reporting

Data-based decision-making is a must for healthcare and emergency response organizations, and it’s vital for them to have access to data and generate reports fast. With Workforce.com, COVIDCheck Colorado is able to retrieve actionable insights from their own data. Moreover, since all the data is in one place, they are able to avoid doubling up how it is recorded.

“We’re avoiding redundancy … It’s more accessible and efficient for us,” shared Watts. “We don’t have to rely on a paper system. We have everything automated, allowing us to pull a report whenever we want … I’m clicking a button and I can analyze the data right away.”

The partnership between COVIDCheck Colorado and Workforce.com helped give people their daily lives back. Running an emergency healthcare response operation with many locations required innovative solutions. There needed to be a system in place that enabled teams to efficiently respond to any and all needs.

Parrie sees a parallel between Workforce.com and emergency healthcare response programs. “The system actually is merciful,” he states. “It’s delivering care and service in a way you may never see and never know or acknowledge. But it’s there doing that work. And that is incredibly powerful.”