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App Helps Keep Work Environments Safe From COVID-19

Safe2Work can help “overworked HR departments” wade through the COVID-19 crisis, the app’s creators say.
  • Tom Davis
  • November 2021
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Safe2Work App

Employers are looking for efficient ways to keep work environments safe from COVID-19. Optis, a division of the managed care provider Genex Services, has developed Safe2Work, an app-enabled, web-based health screening program designed to help stop the spread of workplace illness.

Jacob Sipko

Jacob Sipko

Bryan Stonecipher

Bryan Stonecipher

Jacob Sipko, vice president of sales for the Southwest region of Genex, and Bryan Stonecipher, president of Optis, spoke to Best's Review about how the Safe2Work app provides risk mitigation and helps ensure employers and employees that, when they go to work, they're safe. Following is an edited transcript of an interview with Sipko and Stonecipher.

What inspired you to launch the app?

Sipko: Following the lockdown and essential businesses reopening, we were starting to get a lot of calls at Genex—being a managed care leader and knowing we have clinical tools available—on, “How can we safely reopen?”

How does the app work?

Stonecipher: If you log in every day, [you] do a self-assessment using the CDC guidelines. [It asks:] “Do you have a fever? Are you coughing?” Any other guidelines on there, you can say no and it says, “Go on, head to work.” If you say yes, then it actually gets deeper into what you have: “What's your fever? Are you dizzy, loss of taste, anything of that nature?”

If you do, it actually tells you, “OK, here are the next steps that need to take place.” Based on what the company wants, you could go immediately to call a doctor.

How does this app assist in terms of absence management and risk mitigation?

Stonecipher: It has the ability to really reach out and help a lot of overburdened, overworked HR departments right now, because they're a little lost right now. They're really trying to figure out how to handle this. Especially with the second wave moving in again, it's still leaving everybody out on an island.

How will this benefit someone as he or she returns to the office or job site amid the COVID pandemic?

Stonecipher: It allows for the company to track it, to help ensure that people who are coming in the facilities are clear. If they do come in one day and it's clear, and the next day, they feel they've got symptoms, they know who was inside the facilities during that day

Does it address leave management?

Stonecipher: We take the system and work it around whatever your heart desires, where you flow.


Tom Davis is managing editor. He can be reached at tom.davis@ambest.com.



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