We were beginning to see the light at the end of the COVID pandemic tunnel, but we were not out of the woods yet. Our employee health team is responsible for taking care of the physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals and staff members who in turn take care of our patients.
On September 2, 2022, the COVID Bivalent Booster vaccination was approved for people aged 12 years and older. Challenges were addressed to offer the COVID Bivalent Booster vaccination along with Flu vaccinations to a workforce of greater than 80,000.
Enterprise Health is the occupational and employee health technology that has helped our team manage employee health during the pandemic. Northwell expects our digital infrastructure to support our innovative position.
Enterprise Health helped us be the first health system to administer a COVID vaccine in the United States. They rapidly configured their software to document COVID vaccine injections, and one of our nurses received the first shot.
That same solution enabled us to track vaccine compliance across our entire employee population, and to provide electronic data transmission to both the state and city vaccine registries.
We were also able to use the technology to manage daily symptom monitoring across our employee population. Using an employee portal and a mobile app, employees were prompted to electronically self-report before every shift – enabling us to use technology to quickly identify who was authorized to work and who needed medical intervention.
Also configured was direct transmission of COVID and flu lab test results performed throughout the health system. Team members could be tested at any location, with the results sent back to Employee Health Services for evaluation.
With more than 80,000 associates as well as a large contingent of volunteers, contractors, students and other populations, the technology enabled our employee health team to provide top-notch care and guidance.
Our work with the vendor started during COVID, and in 2022 we began to layer on the additional occupational and employee health functionality available in its solution. We are taking a phased approach to deployment, and the vendor is working with our team to configure its solution to support our unique use cases and workflows.
This is a delicate balancing act, as we are sticking as close to their standard solution as possible while allowing for Northwell-specific configuration where appropriate. We are proceeding methodically, as in some cases we are adjusting some of our processes to align with best practices Enterprise Health has put in place for other health system clients, and in other cases they are enhancing their standard based on our input.
We are working together extremely well as one extended team, and our “forged in fire” experiences during the intense early days of COVID have helped us develop a collaborative work style that is very effective. We also value the fact that our suggestions for improvement more often than not end up on their product roadmap, and progress can be measured in weeks and months rather than years.
We have also been working on an innovative approach to consolidating multiple population data feeds from Northwell to the vendor. When we started working together during COVID, we had to quickly establish interfaces with multiple sources of population data at Northwell – including our primary HR system as well as applications used to manage volunteers, students, contractors and other populations.
All of these feeds required that we establish complex logic to manage the disparate population information coming into Enterprise Health. We have worked closely to build a single data feed that is consolidated at Northwell, and that feed has been built to a set of specifications best suited to the vendor.
As our technology teams have collaborated for several years now, they are able to explore ways to simplify the inherent complexity found in a large health system like Northwell.
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