The pandemic has brought on unprecedented challenges for HR leaders to sustain operations. Organizations need tools to gather and track relevant health information to limit the risk of virus transmission. Now that vaccines are available, developing COVID-19 vaccine tracking methods may be an important step in protecting the health of employees and normalizing business operations. If you determine that tracking is necessary for your organization this article presents a few configuration options available that support vaccine tracking within the OnePoint system.
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At this time neither the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) nor the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have issued guidance on whether vaccination tracking falls under HIPPAs regulatory body. Consult with your legal council regarding any applicable compliance issues to your business related to vaccine tracking or incentivizing employees to obtain a vaccine.
HR Centric Vaccine Tracking Options
Create Custom Vaccine Tracking Fields
For most employers, vaccine tracking is simply knowing that an employee is vaccinated. In this situation the easiest method to track is simply using a custom field on employee record. It is easy to set up custom fields.
Set up custom COVID-19 fields like Vaccine 1 date, Vaccine 2 date, and Vaccine type/manufacturer. Custom fields can be set up as text fields, date fields, picklists and more. Moreover the multi-tenant architecture allows administrators to add custom fields to support COVID-19 vaccine tracking without additional configuration assistance from OnePoint.
Employee Vaccine Tracking Using Credential Management
Using Credentials in OnePoint for vaccine tracking requires the custom field set up step, shown above, but taking the extra step gives administrators more straightforward reporting and notification actions.
Using the custom COVID-19 fields within a specific credential activates expiration notifications. It is easy to configure automatic notification to the employee and any other groups (i.e manager or HR Team) to remind the employee of vaccine expiration based on the date they received the vaccine. The notifications can be set up to remind employees of expiration dates with a customized email message. Using unified workforce data you can also build a custom data HUB to display real-time vaccination data views to your HR Team and managers that are authorized to see this data.
Credential management also makes reporting easier. Credentials are assigned employees and by unique list view. Administrators can simply look at the Covid-19 vaccine credential for an easier view of employees. Credentials reports can be added to dashboards and those automatic notifications make it really easy to see credential expirations.
Employee Self-Service Vaccine Tracking Solutions
Automate vaccine tracking through self service checklists
Another option for vaccine tracking is to use self-service to let you employees submit the required information about the vaccine including the date, which shot, and the brand.
This self service submission is accomplished through a checklist. Set up the checklist with the questions you want the employee to answer and make the checklist available through the my checklists menu. The employee can navigate to this checklist on desktop or mobile, mobile makes it really easy for employees to complete the checklist right after receiving a vaccination.
Using a checklist empowers the employee to update their vaccine tracking information for HR to review rather than keying in the data for the employees. The checklist process can also a sign-off verification using digital signatures feature or mobile biometrics. This lets the employee certify that the information they are providing about the vaccination is correct.
Another great feature for using a checklist for the vaccine tracking process is the ability to let the employee upload an additional document like the doctor’s note or the shot card. In the mobile experience this is as simple as taking a photo and upload the photo to the checklist through document upload.
Create a Custom PTO Category
In our latest HR Insight webinar “Vaccinations and Your Workplace” the attorney discussed that mandating vaccinations is not a good strategy. However, there are clever ways to incentivize employees to get a vaccine, like offering a special PTO benefit.
The OnePoint platform makes it easy to set up a special PTO Category specifically for the COVID-19 vaccination process. Use our state-of-the-art workflow engine to give employees a seamless experience and empower vaccine tracking in real-time using their own devices.
Using a custom PTO process for vaccine tracking has several advantages:
- The PTO request can have rules for the amount of time you are offering pre-set.
- The PTO request has workflows and HR actions that can route approvals to managers and activate checklists for the employees.
- Triggering a checklist makes it easy for the employee to complete the steps for the vaccine tracking process. Through self-service they are prompted with the custom fields and can provide information back into the system,
- This method simplifies reporting by having all COVID-19 vaccine requests categorized.
**Again it is important to note there isn’t definitive guidance from CDC or the HHS on whether vaccine data information falls under HIPPA regulatory body for employers at this time. Please consult a labor law attorney to determine if COVID-19 vaccine tracking is appropriate for your organization.
All-in-One HCM Simplifies Workplace Health and Safety Tracking
Since the pandemic began, OnePoint has continued to introduce ways to harness our unified HCM platform to support new work conditions. Companies utilizing a single HR infrastructure like OnePoint have more flexibility to use existing tools to ask for and capture employee health and wellness information to minimize risk. Companies utilizing a single HR infrastructure like OnePoint have more flexibility to capture data, like health screening questions or a custom vaccine tracking process with checklists. These powerful tools allow HR administrator to create dynamic dashboards for quick views into the workforce. Advanced workflows and notifications set up proactive monitoring and compliance notifications that bring your HR data to life.