Q: What is the best argument for integrating occupational and employee health?
A: “In our system, it’s been difficult for employees and occupational health to come together. Over the years, we’ve had to point out that we were duplicating services. To me, it’s more efficient to integrate because it saves costs and allows you to stay competitive.”
A: “There are degrees of advisability for integrating. Some reasons are good, others suggest it might not be the best idea. What is integration? It may be staff, software, or service…there are many components that may or may not apply in every case. When we talk about integrating, very frequently, one of the services is not stronger than the other.”
Q: How effectively does the leading occupational health software incorporate employee health?
A: “Many of the occupational health software programs started by looking at hospital-based programs, so they were very agile and adept at putting together regulatory requirements. They were excellent at making sure people were being compliant with regulatory procedures.”
A: “You want to look at three questions: the quality of your software in the first place, the potential savings of integration, and the inherent cost of transferring from a separate system to an integrated system.”
Q: What elements make the most sense to integrate?
A: “We struggled in the olden days with regulatory compliance because it required a great deal of evaluation and looking through manual charts to find out about compliance components. Nowadays, it certainly streamlines work and only requires one clerk vs. four or five. Being able to have types of documentation in a template helps, so information is standardized.”
A: “Centralizing services–-things like scheduling, billing, protocol and maintenance.”
Q: How do you sell integration to the HR administration who wants to keep control of employee health?
A: “Point out the synergies . . . the reduction in costs, the efficiencies, these are all things that would convince an administrator to get out of their silo and integrate into the system.”
A: “It takes time for both sides to come together and for administration to look outside the box, see the pros and cons.”
