Reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19 for your clients and employees.
A simple process you can implement at your home healthcare company to keep clients and employees safe from unnecessary exposure to COVID-19.
Part 1 of our COVID-19 Processes for Home Healthcare mini-series.
- Process for Symptom Self-Attestation for Employees
- Process for Vaccine Self-Attestation for Employees and Clients
Updated: Jan. 27, 2021
Many of the home healthcare companies we work with are coming up with new ways they can combat the spread of COVID-19.
One way is to have your field clinicians, aides, and nurses regularly self-identify whether or not they pose a heightened risk of exposing clients to COVID-19 or other communicable diseases or illnesses. This is done by asking employees if they are exhibiting common symptoms of the virus or if they have been at risk of exposure to the virus.
We recently partnered with Patrick Wong and the team at Brightstar Care (Laredo / Rio Grande Valley / San Antonio) to come up with an efficient way to perform these regular assessments with minimal interruption to operations, and minimal time and cost investment.
We came up with an extremely simple solution that takes the office 10 minutes to implement, and two minutes for employees to fill out.
How to rapidly implement a process of risk self-identification.
Time needed: 10 minutes
Step 1: Setup a Google Drive Account
If you already use GSuite, you can jump ahead to Step 2. For those of you who don't, setup a free Personal Google Drive account.
A Business account is not required for this process, and you only need one office employee to perform this step.
Step 2: Copy our free Google Form template
We put together a free Google Form template which lists out common symptoms and high risk exposure indicators. This will place a Google Form in your Google Drive account.
Open the form to review the questions and modify as desired. Click the icon in the top right to preview the form.
Click the “Responses” tab at the top, and then click the Google Sheets icon in the top right (white cross on a green background).
You will be asked where you want to save responses. Make sure “Create a new spreadsheet” is selected, and click “Create”. This will open a spreadsheet where Employee responses will be written automatically. Their responses will include the time which they completed the form and their corresponding answers.
Step 3: Share the form with your Employees
Finally, click back to the Google Form and click “Send”. You will be asked how you would like to send the form, and presents you with a few options. You can use any option you prefer, but we will focus on the option we had the most success with:
Send by link. Click the link icon (to the right of the envelope) and copy/paste the link into an email distribution list, a mass-text message solution, your EMR, or through a secure communication solution like Notifyd. If you don't want the hassle of managing one-off emails and texts, give Notifyd a try with a 7-day free trial.
Once the link has been shared, Employees will be able to open the form from their phone or computer. All responses will automatically be saved in the Google Sheet you created earlier, and you can access it at any time. Additionally, Google Sheets gives you the ability to filter by employee, date, and answers to questions.
If you need to store the results, simply export a CSV or Excel file from Google Sheets.
Step 4: Determine how often to run this self-assessment.
Will you do this daily? Every other day? Weekly? Once you decide, simply set a calendar reminder and re-run step 3.
Employees can fill out the form multiple times, so you can use the same Google Form link and capture all responses in the same Google Sheet.
That's right! One file captures all responses forever; no need to keep track of hundreds of emails, text messages, or individual files!
Notifyd is a great solution for tasks like these, because it is extremely easy to mass-message your staff, you will see far better response rates from employees, and you will have access to various tools that make managing your communications easy and secure.