How COVIDCheck Colorado administered over 800,000 tests and 300,000 vaccines

It all started with the team at Gary Community Investments aiming to help people return to the community safely with free COVID-19 testing and vaccination. “A response to what we saw out across the state of Colorado—half a million people out of work, a million kids who could no longer be in school in person,” shared Eric Parrie, CEO of COVIDCheck Colorado.

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“Without Workforce.com, we wouldn’t have been able to run our vaccine sites. It is an integral part of being able to understand what staffing levels we needed across all of our vaccines sites and how those staffing levels needed to be adjusted over time based on metrics and number of doses we were allocating,” said Emily Baron, Chief Public Health Officer at COVIDCheck Colorado.

Empowering frontline teams to respond quickly and provide quality healthcare

Things are happening rapidly at the same time in healthcare and emergency response operations. It’s vital for frontline teams to have tools in place that will help them perform their tasks quickly and respond to changes immediately. 

“Solving workforce management was a priority, because it is the heart of our entire operation. So of those 1,400 people, the overwhelming majority of them are frontline heroes, who are working day-to-day in the toughest conditions, on testing sites. Their full concern had to be delivering top service to thousands of patients, in many cases, who were feeling exposed, sick, or just nervous, and needed to be able to have the full attention of a clinical professional right there with them. They couldn’t be worrying about who was going to be showing up on-site and when. They needed a set of tools that would solve that problem before they came into contact with the first of thousands of patients, in a given day,” Parrie explained. 

Workforce.com empowered COVIDCheck Colorado to streamline different areas of workforce management to make their team more agile and productive. Here are some of the processes that the platform made more efficient for them:

• Optimizing staff levels across multiple vaccination sites

COVIDCheck vaccination sites have varying needs in terms of medical staff, and they need to deploy the required number of health workers quickly to the locations that need them. 

“For instance, when we see that we’re down EMTs, we know immediately that we have to get them because that site can’t run without them. Workforce.com has really helped us bridge the gap between onsite and offsite teams, and make sure that we are providing people what they need to be successful. When our staff are successful, it means that our mission is successful because we’re providing the services that they’re supposed to provide,” shared Watts.

• Complying with medical requirements 

Compliance is also a major component of running a healthcare operation, and for a fast-paced organization like COVIDCheck Colorado, things can’t be afforded to fall through the cracks. They needed a robust platform that would ensure that the staff with the right medical credentials are scheduled where they are needed. 

“Unlike testing, the vaccination sites were very particular about the credentials that someone needs to have in order to vaccinate. What Workforce.com has allowed us to do is be able to quickly assess who is actually qualified from a medical certification perspective to do the different roles. 

Our vaccination sites can have about 20 different roles, but probably 10 of them are very particular as far as what the medical credentials have to be. And without Workforce.com, that would put us in a big compliance risk if someone were performing duties that they weren’t actually medically certified to be able to do,” explained Carol Carrasquillo, Site Optimization Director at COVIDCheck Colorado.  

• Faster and paperless timesheet approval

Tracking and approving timesheets becomes more tedious and prone to error when it’s done on paper. But this was not a concern for COVIDCheck Colorado when they started using Workforce.com, especially when their operations scaled.

“The biggest benefit of Workforce.com is allowing us to do so many things in a more efficient way. We no longer rely on paper timesheets. Our staff members, our site staff, and our site leadership are all able to actually approve timesheets online. The speed at which we’re able to do things is so much different. I don’t have to wait for somebody to respond to me in Slack or in an email, they can just go into Workforce.com and approve somebody’s time,” Watts shared. 

• Automated payroll process

Another core area of business operations is paying staff accurately and on time. Because it’s easy for COVIDCheck to track time and attendance and schedules via Workforce.com, processing payroll became a seamless and quick process. 

“The biggest benefit of Workforce.com for me is basic fundamental business operations— who do we have on staff and what hours are they working. We can reconcile their payroll and make sure that we’re paying people accurately. Labor’s probably one of the most expensive costs that any business has. If we can maintain those costs then we can actually take the money that we have and invest those in other opportunities that can help reach the community,” explained Carrasquillo.

• Centralized data and reporting 

Data-based decision-making is a must for healthcare and emergency response organizations, and it’s vital for them to have access to data and generate reports fast. COVIDCheck are able to get actionable insights from their own data through Workforce.com. Because all information is in one place, they were able to avoid doubling up how data is recorded. 

“We’re avoiding redundancy when my data can help a different department, or a different department’s data that’s already in Workforce.com can help me. It’s more accessible and efficient for us. We don’t have to rely on a paper system and a paper trail and we have everything automated, allowing us to pull a report whenever we want. And pulling a report doesn’t mean that we’re putting together a bunch of different papers that we used at one point. It’s literally already in one place and I’m clicking a button to download it and I can analyze the data right away,” shared Watts. 

The magic of healthcare and Workforce.com

Running an operation with multiple locations and with a focus as critical as emergency healthcare response requires the most innovative solutions. There has to be a system in place that enables teams to efficiently respond in the moment and at the same time anticipate future needs.

“We decided to choose Workforce.com over other vendors for a few reasons. Primarily, it was simple and easy to use, both for our leadership team, and for folks right on site, in the heat of the moment. It was also clear that Workforce.com is backed up by a team that was responsive and adaptable. That was really critical for us,” Parrie said. 

“The value and magic of something like COVIDCheck Colorado and of a system like Workforce.com is that that system actually is merciful. It delivers care and service you may never even know existed, but it’s actually doing something to protect folks, often invisibly and inaudibly, but it’s there doing that work. And that’s the real power and value of a software system and of a public health system. It’s delivering care and service in a way you may never see and never know or acknowledge. But it’s there doing that work. And that is incredibly powerful.”