By now, all private organizations should be aware that on November 4, 2021, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Authority issued an Emergency Temporary Standard on COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing.
Broadly the mandate requires that employers with 100 or more employees ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated or require any workers who remain unvaccinated to produce a negative test result on at least a weekly basis before coming to work. Although it is currently under litigation, employers have until January 4 to implement the mandate within the current guidelines.
What does this mean for employers?
Corporate executives should treat the new mandate rules seriously. There are clear fines for not complying with this mandate, and they can add up fast. As it stands, employers have less than eight weeks to comply with the January 4 deadline.
This means organizations need to have a plan in place to communicate with employees about requirements to meet the mandate as well as how and what they must do to meet the order. As part of that, employers must be ready to answer the following questions:
- How will we collect vaccine document proof from our employees?
- How will we verify that the documents are indeed acceptable vaccine proof?
- How do we accept and administer medical and religious exemptions?
- What do we tell employees who are not and do not want to get vaccinated?
- Will we have a weekly COVID-19 testing program for these unvaccinated employees?
- What do we do about booster requirements?
- Does our vaccination verification strategy include direct confirmation with state immunization registries for proof of vaccination?
Employers with large employee bases will most certainly need a technology system or platform to manage the scale of data being collected and maintained to meet the mandate.
How can vaccine verification software help with meeting the new mandates?
Vaccine verification software is about efficiently managing the scale and sensitivity of private health information. Companies can’t effectively, nor securely, run a vaccine verification program by having thousands of employees emailing copies of official vaccine records to a simple corporate email inbox.
Instead, employers should consider time-tested, bullet-proof vaccine verification software with a trusted vendor who has done this with hundreds of other entities and millions of vaccine records to assist in managing this risk.
What to Look for in a Vaccine Verification Solution
Time-tested, bullet-proof vaccine verification software, with a trusted vendor who has done this with hundreds of other entities and millions of vaccine records, can assist in managing this risk.
With customizable, cloud-based portals, the right vaccine management software should make it easy to scale a vaccine verification program for companies of all sizes. In addition, data security is a must when dealing with sensitive health information, so vaccine verification software should allow companies to collect and store sensitive information without violating employee privacy.
Medicat’s best-in-class vaccine verification technology streamlines the verification process with intuitive, cloud-based verification software and an employee portal that automates compliance checks, notifications, and reporting.