Challenges faced by onsite occupational health clinics and the benefits of OH software in solving those challenges.
Each year in the United States, approximately 2.8 million workers suffer a job-related injury or illness.1 Beyond the pain and suffering these occupational incidents cause, they exert a considerable influence on overall business productivity and profitability. In 2023 alone, U.S. companies incurred over $58 billion in costs linked to disabling workplace incidents, driving up their workers’ compensation insurance expenses, and creating a substantial financial burden for these organizations to overcome.2
Onsite occupational health (OH) clinics play a crucial role in mitigating these costs. However, realizing better health outcomes is more than simply making OH services more readily available to your workforce. Onsite occupational health clinics must be optimized with best practice protocols and workflows to be truly effective at reducing the risks of on-the-job injuries and illnesses. Furthermore, access to enterprise-grade OH software can be critical in building an occupational health practice that delivers real results.
In this blog, we will review:
- What onsite occupational health clinics are and how it saves organizations money;
- The challenges onsite OH clinics face and the benefits derived from OH software; and
- A simple checklist that can help organizations plan for an effective digital transformation of their onsite OH clinic practice.
Understanding the Role of an Onsite Occupational Health Clinics
An onsite OH clinic is a specialized healthcare facility within or near a workplace. Its purpose is to address employees’ specific health risks and wellness needs while ensuring compliance with legal standards. These clinics offer various services to promote, maintain, and restore workers’ health and wellbeing. Key areas managed by onsite OH clinics typically include:
Preplacement services:
Services include conducting pre-employment health evaluations to ensure job suitability, performing fitness-for-duty assessments to verify employees’ capability to safely perform job tasks, and providing guidance on reasonable workplace health accommodations.
Preventive care:
Services include conducting health screenings for indicators like blood pressure and cholesterol levels, administer routine vaccinations and immunizations, and perform health risk assessments to identify potential health concerns proactively.
Primary care:
Services include offering diagnosis and treatment for common work-related illnesses and minor injuries, providing prescription services, overseeing medication management, along with overseeing return-to-work processes.
Wellness programs:
Services include offering nutrition and weight management counseling to promote healthy lifestyles, smoking cessation programs, stress management resources, and mental health supports.
Onsite OH clinics help reduce the frequency and severity of workplace injuries and illnesses, which in turn lowers healthcare and workers’ compensation costs.
How Onsite Occupational Health Clinics Save Organizations Money
The integration of onsite OH clinicians into the workplace allows them to provide timely and effective care. This ensures that employees have convenient access to medical care with options for walk-in, same-day, and virtual appointments. This convenience reduces the time employees spend away from work, thereby decreasing costs associated with unscheduled absences.
Consider this: Many onsite clinics report a $4 return on investment for every $1 spent on onsite care, with some clinics seeing a 63% reduction in workplace injuries.3 Additionally, companies with onsite clinics often see significant benefits: 64% report reduced medical expenses, nearly 70% observe decreased time lost, and 63% experience fewer emergency room visits.4
Moreover, onsite health clinics can significantly enhance employee productivity and overall wellness. Disengaged employees, due to decreased productivity, cost the U.S. economy between $438 billion and $605 billion annually.5 Access to health services, including onsite health clinics, can help mitigate this issue, leading to a more engaged and productive workforce.
Challenges With Managing Onsite OH Clinics
When organizations establish an onsite OH clinic, developing best practice protocols and workflows is crucial to enhance employee health, mitigate risks, ensure regulatory compliance, and promote overall wellbeing. But health clinics regularly face challenges that hinder their overall effectiveness, impacting health outcomes and organizational compliance.
Here are five critical challenges organizations need to keep in mind when building their onsite OH clinics:
1) Inefficient record-keeping:
Manual handling of employee health medical records can lead to errors, lost documents, and difficulty retrieving employee health histories. This inefficiency not only jeopardizes the accuracy and accessibility of crucial health information, but also hampers the quality of care provided while increasing the risk of compromised health data privacy.
2) Excessive administrative burden:
Manual appointment management processes, for example, increase OH staff’s workload, diverting their focus from more critical tasks. By relying on manual booking processes, managing appointments is often chaotic, resulting in overbookings, missed appointments, and longer wait times for employees, reducing the patient experience and impacting return visits.
3) Limited visibility to health data analysis:
The lack of health data analytics in conventional OH clinical practice can lead to missed opportunities to identify health trends, predict potential health issues, and tailor wellness programs to employees’ unique needs. Manual compilation of health data for reporting purposes is cumbersome, time consuming and prone to errors, ultimately impacting the accuracy of reports, and downstream decision-making.
4) Compliance issues:
Compliance with health regulations is crucial for a health clinic’s legal and safe operation. Gathering data from multiple points, manually tracking regulatory compliance, and generating reports can be time-consuming and prone to errors, increasing the risk of non-compliance and associated penalties.
5) Inconsistent care quality:
Care variability due to a lack of standardized protocols and processes can lead to inconsistent employee health services, resulting in higher employee dissatisfaction rates and ultimately reduced utilization of onsite clinic services.
The Benefits of OH Software Solutions
Implementing advanced OH software solutions within an onsite OH clinic network can transform how organizations manage employee health and wellbeing. Integrating technology into health protocols allows organizations to address various challenges more efficiently and effectively.
Here are some key benefits of leveraging OH software to optimize your workplace health strategy.
Reduce health risks:
By leveraging OH software solutions, organizations can more effectively align their OH clinic services and programs with their organizational and individual-specific risks. These solutions provide leaders with enhanced data visibility, helping to guide health strategies and allocate resources where they are needed most, ultimately reducing workplace health risks.
Lower costs:
OH software solutions enable proactive employee health management by monitoring and mitigating risks and key performance indicators in real-time. This proactive approach reduces the likelihood of occupational illnesses and injury-related absences, boosting productivity and significantly lowering associated costs.
Enhance clinical productivity:
With the right OH software solution, administrative burdens on health professionals are minimized through streamlined processes and improved communication. This allows experts to focus less on administrative task, and more on managing risks and delivering high-quality care, thus enhancing clinical productivity and efficiency.
Better results through insights:
Cutting-edge business intelligence and analytics tools within OH software solutions provide vital insights, empowering organizations to make more informed decisions. These insights lead to better health strategy, improved health outcomes and more efficient operations, driving overall organizational success.
Safeguard privacy:
Advanced OH software solutions offer robust data and application security features, ensuring that sensitive employee health information is always protected. This instills confidence in the quality of OH services delivered and minimizes legal liability from non-compliance, safeguarding employee privacy.
Checklist for implementing an onsite OH clinic with the right software
Starting an onsite OH clinic involves many steps, including selecting the right software to support it. Here’s a simple checklist to help guide you when considering different software options within your occupational health clinic practice:
1) Pick a solution that will grow with you:
Firstly, describe your organization’s current and future health & wellbeing goals. In a rapidly evolving OH environment, adaptability is key. As a result, firms should prioritize software solutions that can be easily configured to meet diverse business needs, while offering capabilities to grow and adapt as conditions and business requirements change. Opt for a multi-tenant software solution over a single-tenant one, as multi-tenancy is more cost-effective in the long run. Unlike single-tenant software, where you’re stuck with the purchased version and must pay for updates, multi-tenant offers a lower cost of ownership and ensures you always have access to the latest, highest-quality version of the tool without extra costs for updates.
2) Evaluate platforms for core capabilities:
When considering software, it’s best to select OH software that integrates seamlessly with other existing EHS and non-EHS platforms. This unification reduces the complexities of managing multiple systems and makes data integration across systems easier to achieve. Secondly, prioritize solutions with robust data and application security features to protect employee health privacy, safeguard the organization from legal liabilities, and maintain workforce trust.
3) Workflow-oriented but flexible:
Select an OH software provider that offers pre-configured workflows available out-of-the-box that you can shape to your business needs. This enables quicker implementation and a faster time to value from your initial investment. At the same time, any OH software selected should offer the flexibility to adapt workflows, tools and templates to your organization’s unique requirements.
4) Focus on simplicity and usability:
For an OH software solution to be successful, it must have excellent user experience to ensure proper adoption across all facets of your business. Look for solutions that are thoughtfully designed, while offering extensive resources and training materials to help users navigate the system effectively.
Final Thoughts
Implementing an onsite OH clinic is a strategic investment significantly reduces workplace injuries and illnesses. This ultimately helps organizations reduce their operating costs substantially. The effectiveness of these clinics depends on their ability to deliver the right care to the right people at the right time. A well-implemented onsite OH clinic is a cost-saving measure, as well as, a vital component in fostering a safer, healthier, and more productive workplace.
Want to learn more? Check out Cority’s Occupational Health Solution or request a demo today!
Sources:
1 https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/osh.pdf
