Protect your healthcare capacity by promoting COVID-19 vaccine adoption and understanding.
A simple process you can implement at your home healthcare company to keep clients and employees safe from unnecessary exposure to COVID-19.
Part 2 of our COVID-19 Processes for Home Healthcare mini-series.
- Process for Symptom Self-Attestation for Employees and Clients
- Process for Vaccine Self-Attestation for Employees and Clients
Updated: Jan. 27, 2021
Home healthcare companies are turning to vaccines to protect their employees and clients, and to help maintain their healthcare capacity.
One major hurdle healthcare providers are facing during this ongoing pandemic is keeping their employees free of COVID-19 so they can continue seeing patients. Having employees unavailable to work for 2 weeks at a time has placed an incredible strain on healthcare capacity. Now that vaccines are becoming available, home healthcare companies are amending their processes to overcome this hurdle.
Late December 2020, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the CDC both reported on the importance of vaccinations for healthcare personnel. In some states, including our home state of Texas, the state Health and Human Services department are establishing requirements for HCSSA agencies to document vaccination records and educate staff and clients on the options, pros, and cons of vaccination.
We recently partnered with Synerimages Healthcare Consulting to develop a quick, easy, and effective process for company administrators who are responsible for vaccination tracking and promotion. This process has minimal interruptions to operations and requires minimal time and cost investment..
We came up with an extremely simple solution that takes the office 15 minutes to implement, and two minutes for employees and clients to fill out.
How to rapidly implement a process for vaccine tracking and adoption.
Time needed: 15 minutes
Step 1: Setup a publicy accessible, HIPAA-compliant form provider
A simple online search for "HIPAA forms" will show there are many providers out there, but for this article we will assume you are using Google Drive. The reason you need it to be HIPAA-compliant, is because you will be capturing PHI from your Clients - so make sure you get a signed BAA from whichever vendor you choose!
If your business is already using Google Drive, you can jump ahead to Step 2. For those of you who don't, you can setup a Business Google Drive account in a few minutes.
Step 2: Copy our free Vaccine Tracking templates
We put together two free Google Form templates: one for employees, and one for clients. These links will place a copy of our Google Form templates in your Google Drive account. If you are not using Google Drive, you can still download the templates and copy the questions into your preferred form provider.
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 and Clients 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 and Clients
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 and Clients 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 vaccine tracking attestation.
Will you do this weekly? Monthly? Once you decide, simply set a calendar reminder and re-run step 3.
Employees and Clients 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.