Victoria HarkerWhen covid-19 surfaced last year, the world’s largest medical transport company, Global Medical Response (GMR), launched a comprehensive program to protect its 37,000 front-line employees.
Soon, their clients were asking for the program to be adapted to their worksites. That’s when GMR decided to take it commercial. Today, it is helping companies in all 50 states safely return to work.
Demand is being driven by “overwhelmed” employers who just want to get back to running their businesses, Mark Davidson, national director of Innovative Practices, Business Development, for GMR.
“Their internal teams have been completely overwhelmed and inundated by Covid and they realize they have to get their people off of the Covid task forces and the Covid projects and get them back to business,” he said.
SafeRestart provides everything companies and agencies need to return to work safely, from prescreening to testing and monitoring to vaccinations.
“At the end of the day, the theme is peace of mind and business continuity,” Davidson said.
Scaling to meet public, private sector needs
Initially, SafeRestart’s first clients were employers with critical and essential workforces like healthcare, logistics and manufacturing.
Today, it services private and public companies and government agencies in all sectors including Fortune 500 benefits brokerage firms, school districts, prisons, nursing homes, casinos, and governing bodies like boards of directors, city councils and state legislatures.
How it works
SafeRestart provides “end-to-end solutions” to vaccinate workers and identify, evaluate, isolate, and monitor potentially infected employees. It also has a digital app to guide and inform the workforce.
Services include:
Pre-entry screening Employees begin with a proprietary self-assessment tool before they enter the workplace to determine their risk for exposure. The entry screening can be further combined with in-person or autonomous temperature screening tools at work sites for added vigilance.
Rapid testing Rapid testing determines if at-risk employees are COVID-19 positive. Results can be determined in as little as one hour of administering the test, depending on the type of test used, instead of waiting up to one week with many other testing options.
Nursing support for isolated employees Employees in self-isolation are supported by a Nurse Navigation team, with phone-based access to nurses who can navigate the impacted employee through the process of self-isolation and provide guidance on treatment options.
Virtual medical monitoring Self-isolated employees are enrolled in active monitoring via a web-based and smartphone app. During the isolation period, they receive reminders twice daily to log their temperature and symptoms for monitoring by a medical team.
Return-to-work recommendation Specially-trained nurses review the daily self-reported symptoms and follow physician-developed protocols to determine when the individual no longer poses a threat and can safely return to work with minimal risk of infecting coworkers and customers.
New normal
Davidson expects the service to grow even as the public gets vaccinated. Protecting employees and customers from Covid and other infectious disease outbreaks is the new normal, Davidson said.
“With new variants of the disease, nobody knows what that is going to look like,” he said. “Many companies are still remote or fractionally bringing or transitioning employees back. There has to be some date for employees to come back to work.”
For more information about the SafeRestart program visit: access2care.net/SafeRestart or call: 855.267.0911.
Joseph Kavetsky
Noemi Santaella
Guest Contributor
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