Castlight Health has launched a new technology designed to help employers develop safer workforce reentry strategies as the coronavirus pandemic continues. 

WHY IT MATTERS
Working Well is designed as an end-to-end solution that helps employers of any size chart safe reopening strategies, according to Castlight Health. It can track population-level health, assessing symptoms and exposure risk, and enables worksite contact tracing.

Employees are guided through a series screening and testing protocols, which are customizable to employers' own return-to-work policies; the tool is also able to evolve as the facts around the pandemic do.

It gives employers a real-time dashboard of the current health of their staff, using Castlight’s machine learning technology to help forecast health trends and productivity impact. The company says that protocols can be defined according to organizations' needs and applied to specific sub-populations, such as by location or job type. 

Working Well integrates with Castlight’s partner ecosystem and gives direction to local testing centers using Castlight’s own Test Site Finder tool. It capitalizes on Castlight's navigation expertise to direct workers to appropriate resources, such as telehealth and virtual care, or behavioral health resources.

THE LARGER TREND
Castlight Health has drawn on guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, governments and public health departments to develop new guidance, as with its COVID-19 State-by-State Reopening Directory, which collects and consolidates more than 15 critical data points for employers working to reopen. 

As the healthcare industry moves cautiously toward reopening and expanded offerings, several new analytics tools are being rolled out to help with the shift.

For instance, Cerner this week announced it is working with Hospital IQ, which specializes in automation technology, to help hospitals and health systems build out their clinical and operational predictive analytics capabilities, to better understand where resources are in use and how they can be more efficiently deployed as elective surgeries resume.

Data management is key to safely and effectively managing employees as they return to works, said Dr. Peter Lee, global medical director at GE and clinical professor at Yale School of Medicine, in a recent article exploring reopening strategies.

"What’s so unique about COVID is that it’s such a dynamic process for employees," he said. "There are great ways of categorizing where our employees are, like being tested to have it, suspected to have it or having it. Each employee will migrate from category to category over time. You need a technology platform for the data, and also the ability to maneuver the data as the situation changes for each employee."

ON THE RECORD
"In helping employers tackle the challenges presented by COVID-19, Castlight is delivering a solution that addresses the local context of workforce reentry, while supporting evidence-based clinical protocols through our partner ecosystem," said Castlight CEO Maeve O’Meara in a statement.

"We fully expect this solution and these practices will expand and evolve as the country’s knowledge of the virus and available tools advance," she added.

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
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