Employee COVID Testing

hello everybody my name is jeff dannell and i'm president of enterprise health and i'd like to welcome you to today's webinar which is going to focus on the role that kova testing plays in keeping your employee population healthy and safe i'm going to be moderating today's session and we have a wonderful slate of speakers with us from

a company called drug scan that we've started to partner with on behalf of several of our clients just to give you a little bit of context about enterprise health this is uh this is our elevator pitch for uh for those of us who now feel safe enough to ride in an elevator with other people and we're the

only cloud-based health it solution that combines occupational health and compliance clinical care and employee engagement on a single interoperable certified electronic health record platform and we focus on equipping our enterprise clients and their employees for a healthier future we work with a wide mix of blue chip global corporations government agencies and hospitals and health systems who operate

their own on-site employee health clinics and provide employee health services to other organizations now just a couple of housekeeping items for today we've muted everyone except for our moderators and our panelists on entry to minimize background noise we are recording the session so we will email everyone a link in a few days so you can access the

recording and share it and today's panelists have really been immersed in all things covid for going on now almost two years so we have a frontline perspective on the importance of testing as part of a covid management strategy so i'm going to take a little bit of time to provide some context and then our panelists from drugscan

are going to talk more about their organizations and their insight on topic testing and then we'll open it up for q a so along the way you can submit questions uh via the q a feature in webex and then at the end we'll get to as many of those as we possibly can i know the webinar is

scheduled to run 90 minutes i'm not sure if it'll take that long today but uh you know we we plan to move through the uh through the material pretty quickly here uh respecting everybody's time i really don't have to remind anybody on this call about what a wild ride the last 20 plus months have been and the

image that you're looking at on the screen is a roller coaster car from space mountain so for those of you who have not been on this ride at disney park it actually takes place in the dark so you really can't see the next curve the next hill the next twist or turn but because it's a disney ride

you know it's going to be fun you know it's going to be safe and you know it's going to be over in exactly two and a half minutes now the covet coaster uh has been similarly unpredictable and it certainly feels like we've been hurtling through the dark and subjected to a non-stop barrage of surges and variances and

and ever-changing and often conflicting guidance mandates different requirements not to mention a healthy dose of misinformation and partisan sniping and fear and rancor now unlike a well-engineered and well-maintained disney ride the covet coaster feels a lot more rickety a lot more unsafe and and you get the impression that there are pieces of track missing along the way

and vaccine mandates have certainly been a part of this very wild ride and last year late last year it appeared that the united states was going to be subjected to three different government mandates that would end up impacting almost every employer organization of any size there was the osha ets mandate which would require vaccinations or regular testing

for companies with more than 100 employees then there's the cms health care mandate which would require vaccinations for workers at healthcare facilities that accept medicare or medicaid funding and then there's the safer federal agency mandate which would require vaccinations for anyone employed at a government agency as well as contractors and subcontractors working with those agencies not to

mention individual employers who decided to make vaccination a term of employment regardless of whether a mandate applies now over the latter half of last year i know we worked with most of our clients to gear up for these mandates to be ready we configured enterprise health to manage vaccination status enabling employees to do things like complete status

questionnaires upload proof of vaccination complete exemption request forms we helped our clients track and manage their employee populations and develop mechanisms to be able to manage regular testing for any unvaccinated employees who might qualify for a medical or religious exemption and i know as our organization works with a number of government agencies as a contractor and a

subcontractor we actually had to experience firsthand the complex challenge of tracking and managing employee vaccine status for ourselves so enterprise health employees were able to use our software to provide information upload pictures of their vaccine cards that sort of thing so after helping our clients navigate all of this for uh for about 20 months uh late last

year we got a firsthand taste of what all of you have been facing and i have to say uh it gave us a new appreciation uh for the challenge and uh you know and was certainly humbling now i think everybody knows that immediately after all of these mandates were announced the legal challenges immediately ensued so there were

a number of challenges a number of lawsuits filed and after they worked their way through the lower courts the osha ets and cms mandates were recently reviewed by the u.s supreme court and the result of that is that the osha ets mandate is now off the table however the cms mandate for health care entities uh stands and

then as far as the safer government agency mandate it actually was not reviewed by the supreme court uh but from everything we're seeing kind of the the prevailing legal wisdom is that it would follow the the same route of the osha ets if it were to make its way to the highest court so it appears that it's

probably a non-starter as well now i will say that we scheduled and planned this webinar prior to the supreme court weighing in on all of this so back then it looked like every organization with more than 100 employees was going to need to have a testing strategy in place for any unvaccinated employee so clearly the landscape has

changed but we really shouldn't assume that the importance of testing has changed all that much so just a little brief history of testing uh and i think we all know that that covet testing has changed dramatically in the last 20 months and of course we're we're all now very well acquainted with the nasal swab and even though

that thing is is really only a few inches long it certainly seems or perhaps feels like it's about 17 feet long when uh when you've got it stuck up your nose and and i think we all saw that early in the pandemic there was a a big push to rapidly develop manufacture and deploy covet tests and in

hindsight initial tests were were developed relatively quickly it didn't take all that long before there was there was some some testing capability out there although it certainly took some time to scale up both test volumes and then to be able to set up kind of the large scale infrastructure that you need to be able to to test

americans widely in addition uh the efficacy of some of those early tests was certainly questionable at best but once tests were available uh there was pressure to ramp up testing capacity quickly and i think we all recall footage of cars lined up for hours at drive through testing sites uh and and i'm sure some of us had

to uh to actually endure some of that but over time we we finally reached a point where it seemed like tests were readily available at home point of care tests were an abundant supply on on drugstore and grocery store shelves uh getting an appointment for a pcr test was relatively easy uh in fact you could you know

do it at the drive-thru at uh at many pharmacy locations then uh sort of a surprise late in the game late last year early this year we got hit with an omicron wave and all of a sudden we were we were kind of back to the future with tests in short supply uh i think we're aware that

the u.s government has responded with a commitment to get hundreds of millions of tests produced uh they created a website where every household could household can go on and order at home tests and we're likely going to catch up somewhere but unfortunately it'll probably be at the point where we no longer need the tests at least for

omicron although it's going to be really good to have that inventory if and when we get hit with a new uh a new variant wave and those images of people waiting in line for hours you know many many miles to get testing uh those images have returned uh and and this is happening again uh and it's kind

of a kind of an appropriate visual for uh for for groundhog day for sure now our experience at uh at enterprise health has kind of kind of mapped this overall history uh and and really our experience has evolved uh as this pandemic has evolved now early on uh some of our clients were leaders they were out there

on the bleeding edge in terms of establishing frontline testing modalities one of our clients pharma company lilly actually set up drive-through testing they were one of the first to do this very early in the pandemic primarily for healthcare workers they wanted to help get those individuals access to testing before it was widely available in the in the

oil and gas space another client of ours philip 66 very early on was able to source and secure an inventory of rapid tests and it was part of their strategy to be able to keep essential workers on the job and they actually tested employees on site and then test results along with a photo of the of the

test cassette and its results were uploaded into the enterprise health solution of course today most of our clients have electronic lab interfaces in place and all of those interfaces have been updated to support electronic orders and results for covid testing streamlines the whole process from from ordering to getting results minimizing data entry all those sorts of things

most recently what we're seeing is that a number of our clients have been working with us to support employee self-testing at home using rapid point-of-care tests and in many cases that testing is being conducted with a proctor from the client employee health services team so they set up a what amounts to a virtual appointment and then use

the telehealth capabilities that are embedded in the enterprise health solution to enable the proctor to really oversee the administration of the at-home test and the collection of results and of course here most recently in in light of recent vaccine mandate rulings uh our client response has been really all over the board we have some clients who said

yeah you know what we're we're going to put a hold on testing we'll put those testing plans on the shelf uh we have other clients who kind of thought about it and said you know what we're going to proceed full steam ahead we still want to make sure that we have good testing measures in place and that's

certainly the case for our health system and hospital clients who are still subjected to the the cms mandate uh we have some clients that test unvaccinated employees periodically uh or they they use testing to be able to manage recently exposed or ill employees as part of a return to work strategy we even have a client that tests

uh any employee who works in a lab setting every single day so you know the the testing landscape is uh is unbelievably fluid uh just just like things have been really throughout this pandemic so let's talk about uh about what now and really you know regardless of mandate status covid testing is still a major pillar of the

coveted response strategy along with other measures like vaccines like wearing mass like social distancing and really if anything if we learned anything over the relatively short history of kovid we know that easing our foot up on the testing gas pedal at a certain point was a mistake and it turned out we were left with inadequate testing capacity

for the omicron surge and now today in the health care sector where again that cms vaccine mandate is in effect having a good testing strategy is essential and most of our health system clients have prepared for this uh you know they're ready for it they need to be able to manage unvaccinated employees and and be able to

test them at regular intervals uh in many cases again we're seeing that individual employers that aren't subject to a mandate have gone ahead and elected to require employee vaccines anyway and make that a term of employment and and certainly these organizations have set up testing workflows as appropriate and then you know even if you set kind of

the vaccine topic aside uh there are many other scenarios where testing you know has to play a critical role going forward uh for example business travel uh and and we are seeing organizations say okay well when it comes to international travel or or even you know routine business travel domestically we we want to make sure that we

have a proper testing regimen in place and a lot of that too is mandated depending on where you're traveling and and what their requirements are we're also seeing the testing you know remains important for returning employees to work after they've had about with covid or they've had coveted exposure and really for managing employee populations in general we're

also seeing that the testing strategies vary somewhat by industry for example we have clients involved in food processing and they see testing as extremely important and a lot of that has to do with working conditions where people are working you know shoulder to shoulder uh in for example a you know a a meat processing plan whereas in

some of our white collar clients there's there's a little bit different attitude so it really uh it really does depend to uh to some degree uh you know what what industry you're in also at home testing continues to grow more prevalent i know this past holiday season many many families relied on point of care testing to determine

is it safe to gather you know who who are we going to allow in our house i know personally my wife and i conducted uh i think three different at-home tests over the last uh month and a half or so either after exposure to people who tested positive for covid and called us to tell us about it

or after we had some covid-like symptoms and you know while while we tested negative all three times um you know we we also wonder about the uh the the efficacy and the sensitivity and specificity of those home tests and and were they really accurate but again you know this this pandemic has proven to be very very unpredictable

uh none of us really knows for sure what lurks around the next corner and when it comes to testing it absolutely makes sense to have a good strategy in place uh with the understanding that that we just have to remain agile responsive and really prepared for every contingency now over the the course of this pandemic one of

the constant refrains that we've heard from our clients is frustration with access to accurate and rapid coded test results and early on it wasn't particularly surprising that there were delays in getting coveted testing in place and getting results back in a timely manner again it took everybody time to to scale up and to react to uh you

know this once in a generation pandemic uh however we're seeing that in some cases these problems have persisted you know even now almost two years into this thing so you know while we're all used to supplying supply chain challenges these days there there's a distinct difference between having to wait on new kitchen cabinets and having to wait

on critical covet test results our clients have certainly placed a premium on finding lab partners who've been able to rise to this challenge i know our organization has been focused on being very agile and responsive over the course of this crisis and we certainly value partner organizations who operate in a similar manner now we were fortunate to

get introduced to drug scan actually through one of our newer clients rochester regional health and that's a health system in new york state and um and we've we've got we got introduced together and have worked together they've been great to work with uh very easy to interface with uh and and very responsive uh to their client community

so we've asked them to talk a little bit today about testing from their vantage point you know what is it that they're seeing uh you know as as a uh a lab vendor uh and we're joined today by uh their western u.s regional leader aaron mark and their business unit manager uh matt roble so what i'm going

to do i'm going to stop sharing and i will turn over control to aaron well jeff i appreciate the introduction um just a little bit about myself i am the western regional um manager so basically i covered the entire western portion of the united states um fortunate for me i didn't have to travel this week because i'm

snowed in in the midwest so um i'll be presenting to you guys today so let's get started here and and as i go through this um if there's any questions don't hesitate to ask or if you want you can hold off to the end of the presentation so a little bit about drug scan um we are backed

by the two billion dollar rochester regional health network um 35 years of laboratory leadership um that was one of the things that attracted me to this company i've been actually with drug scan for over three years now and i've been in this space obviously the cobit spaces is rather new like jeff alluded to about 20 months into

it um but i've been in uh this type of laboratory space for over 10 years um our lab is cap accredited in samsha which is important with for a lot of our customers we have a lot of customers that are treatment center substance abuse treatment centers and so that samsha accreditation um really helps us there phd board

certified staff uh we also had advanced testing platforms including molecular lcms lte ldtd and gc gsms our laboratories in operation 24 7 which is big especially since i on the western uh western part of the united states have a a lot of people that are working late into the evening on the east coast since we're an east

coast company and then upon receipt 98 of the results are reported within uh 20 24 to 48 hours which is very important for a lot of our customers depending on what their needs are um so how are we going to keep your employees safe we're going to keep those employees safe through covid19 testing and so one of

the things we kind of talked about is why is why testing is important and it helps determine if an employee is infected regard regardless of the symptoms i have a lot of um accounts that test their employees regularly and um they've been successful at limiting a major outbreak and having to shut down their office or shut down

their treatment center or long-term care facility um because they're testing on a routine basis so that helps out quite a bit uh this will help slow and stop the spread and then testing is the most effective way to isolate the infected so your business can can continue to run effectively so what type of test do we offer

um so the covet 19 tests that we are that are available are the pcr test which is the gold standard and you also have the antigen rapid tests and then we're going to be launching flu a and b and i'm going to jump back to the antigen rapid test jeff you made a comment just kind of on

the accuracy of those and and that's been the kind of the number one issue is people use these rapid tests and they come come back negative and they're like they're swearing they're positive so that's why we kind of always go back to that pcr test because that that is from a sensitivity and specificity standpoint that is the

gold standard um again what type of tests are available so we have the pcr test which is the polymerase chain reaction and this is basically a molecular test that looks for genetic material from the virus and it's all done in the lab and what it does is it uses the chemicals to reproduce millions to billions of copies

of the viral related dna from a small sample so basically it's looking to find that dna of that the virus and then amplifying it out millions to billions of copies of it it's considered a highly sensitive with very few false positives and it's collected via it's either a nasal pharyngeal oral pharyngeal or saliva i think the best

way to do it is is the nasal pharyngeal and like jeff said that i think that swab is people think it's like 10 feet long um or we have the rapid antigen test and those are those instant tests we were talking about so it's basically a lateral flow test that detects specific antigens it searches for pieces of

protein of the sars cova 2 through the sample being treated with a reagent or analyzed on the spot as moderate to high sensitivity depending on the peak of the viral load sensitive sensitivity is lower which can cause false negatives and positives and this is collected via either a nose swab or a throat swap um types of specimen

collection and turnaround time so collections can occur on site which is probably the best option we can ship to a predetermined location we can also do home shipped to the home where you can have it shipped to the employee's home or we have a patient service center one of many locations throughout the the us um so we

can work if somebody's interested in uh using our collections and in our testing we can work with the individual that's interested in using our services and then turn around time i think this is one of the important and this is one of the important factors that we have a lot of customers shifting away from big box labs

and coming over to us is just one of the greatest factors that affects spread of infection is a slow turnaround time rapid tests will give results in 15 minutes pcr tests will take 24 to 48 hours and our lab processes samples in nine hours of receipt of the sample so if you were to take samples today we

would ship them overnight they would hit our lab in the morning and once they had once they hit our lab and we receive it we can usually get that result out within nine hours so that initial 24 hours is just basically that shipping time i have a lot of accounts like i said that ship from the west

coast and they're actually doing covet samples today we would probably have results for them by the end of the day tomorrow so pretty pretty fast turnaround time for a pcr test where um i had a couple clients telling me that it was taking up to a week or 10 days to get their results back and and with

the um well that by the time you quarantine and everything you're out of the quarantine you still haven't gotten your results back so with us it's usually within 24 to 48 hours and like i said we'll get that result out about nine hours after we receive it and then basically a compliance management management solution and that solution

includes plan to collect samples via on-site or at home depending on what you need what you need an app to capture uh employee compliance and so if you have you know a big employee base um it'd probably be hard to track all of this um you know so the app is going to make it easier to help

capture all of that um data aggregation dashboard to collect employee vaccination and testing a rapid test for quick confirmation of the of infection a pcr test for symptomatic negative rapid tests and then obviously we follow the cdc recommendations for quarantine and return to work and with that i will hand it over to matt which field will touch

based on his portion of the uh of drug scan and dsi thanks aaron i appreciate it uh nice to meet everybody my name is matt robel i work for a business unit within the drug scan world called dsi medical services and the reason that drug scan has dsi is because when they work with employers you know by

the time the specimen gets to the laboratory there's a lot of other things that have happened you know prior to that point uh because it's usually part of a much bigger process of a overall in our world it's a lot of the drug and alcohol testing uh that that's done for employers to help them with their you

know not only their applicant screening but also just sort of an overall philosophy of having a you know a drug in an alcohol free workplace and there's so much that goes into having an effective program and especially in this day and age when there's lots of uh you know different laws both on the federal level on the

state level there's the marijuana issues there's you know safety sensitive issues and there's different types of tests and there's different specimens and there's different levels of accuracy and different um you know uses depending on the type of sample that you're using and employers a lot of times just don't have any idea of of how to pull all

of that into together it into a program that meets their needs creates the safe environment but more importantly minimizes the disruption to the operation to perform such testing so dsi was founded as a way to help companies and help workplaces manage those other aspects of running an effective drug and alcohol testing program and background check and background

applicant background screening program for employers you know really sort of taking that high tech high touch uh mentality to it to really understand the business understand how they operate understand what their needs are understand what their goals are and instead of smashing the proverbial square peg through a round hole really measuring your peg and building a program

utilizing all the different tools that are available and industry best practices uh understanding the geographic limitations the laws that are impacting a particular area and putting it all together into a program to which the actual testing part of it the actual you know sample testing is only one small piece of a larger program so we work with

employers all over the country both in the federally mandated transportation space and then those that just have a general philosophy of trying to create the safest environment possible whether that's just testing as part of their application process or some more robust testing program that could involve things like random testing testing after accidents for cost testing things of

that nature so you know building those programs out helping them develop those policies and practices and deal with all those what-if situations that many people without you know that haven't lived through it might not have thought about that and almost sometimes don't think about it as part of a program like this so that's really what we do

over here at drug scan uh in the in the dsi world is is build those programs for both the drug and alcohol testing program management as well as our as well as our background screening services you know background screening has become uh you know a hot topic in the world recently especially you know if you look at

what's going on in the in the labor environment where you you've had a for years now you've had sort of a shrinking workforce as people have uh you know the boomers have started to you know leave uh and there's just not as many new people coming into the workforce uh and so there's there's been a you know

a labor crunch for a while now and it's been coming kovit has certainly accelerated that and shined a bit of a spotlight on it i mean you can't even go to you know a restaurant now um without you know them telling you have an hour wait and you see 17 tables empty and because they don't have staff

you know you've seen a lot of companies limiting their hours because they don't have staff you've seen you know probably your own business you know struggling to you know find applicants and and everyone that you find has got you know multiple job offers um so you know how do we how do we take this these tasks that

are that are there like you know screening an employee and how do we you know make it an asset to a company so we use terms like uh applicant experience right you know if uh if an applicant you know if it's too hard for an applicant to you know get everything that they need so that you can

do a background check or a drug test you know they're going to end up going with somebody else who it makes it makes the process easier and then the second term that we use a lot is speed to higher right like how do we how do we get the best information in your hands help you make the

decision as quickly as we can to get that person working and making you money or feeling you know filling that seat or feeling that feeling that need um so we spent a lot of time talking to employers about you know how to build a program that does that the other thing that we spend a lot of time

talking to employers about when it comes to the background checks is changing the way that they've maybe thought about it uh for years i mean it's been a it's been an evolving philosophy for a long time you know you used to say you know we're not taking anybody with anything that shows up on their on their record

just you know flat out bright line rules you know lying in the sand and then through uh organizations like the eeoc and some laws and some case law you know they've had to maybe look at things a little bit differently and and look at more like the job relatedness of it and you know um look more specifically

at you know what the issue was that they had in the past and and make some you know make a little deeper decision on an applicant at that time well in this world where there's a labor shortage and and uh everything else going on it's forced employers to really you know take a yet another swipe at how

they how they think about how they utilize the information on a background check you know like instead of saying well we don't take felonies but we'll consider misdemeanors it's like okay well what was the felony well even that even within that felony it's like yep you know we need more information you know did that person you know

how long ago you know was it what is that person done since has that person held a job you know for multiple years you know have they um you know have they you know what other information can that applicant bring to the table to show them that they're not a risk that they have you know changed their

ways that that they have completely rehabilitated and because you know no two people are equal and no two people come from the same situation and you know and no two scenarios are exactly the same so you know how do we find that next level of information um that will help say you know what you know even though

this person may have made some mistakes there's still somebody that i want to that that i think would be successful you know within our organization and you know because you don't want you never want background checks in the use of background checks to create a you know an unemployable segment of the labor market out there because you

know frankly many organizations can't afford to to pass on those types of stuff so how do we equip them to make the best decisions where they're not putting uh you know their organizations at risk uh you know they are doing the right thing for society they are helping people that you know that uh deserve to be helped

and um you know making the best decisions possible having all of the information whereas maybe again it wasn't that way in in years past so those are the types of things that i do and that we can help do uh here at dsi uh that just takes what drug scan does in our overall philosophy and just takes

it another level deeper to be able to provide some additional services to our our uh employer client base so there's my little commercial there with that i'll turn it back over to jeff and see if there's any questions from the group thank you matt and thank you aaron and again if anyone has questions uh please go ahead

and post them in the q a section of the webex uh but i'll throw out a question or two until we get any any others from the attendees you know aaron and matt i'd love to hear from you what have you guys seen in the way your clients have changed their approach to covid testing uh over the

course of this pandemic have you have you seen sort of any any shifts in attitudes or or the approaches that uh that that organizations are employing yeah so i i can answer that um you know it's interesting like when the pandemic first hit everybody was kind of scurrying do we do rapid tests do we do pcr are

we gonna do um look for antibodies if somebody had it and you know it it's like one week we were rapid next week for pcr then we were going to go full on with you know testing people to see if they had the antibodies you know so i think a lot of it has settled down on the

pcr testing just from the accuracy standpoint i have a you know i'll use kind of what a lot of my base is i have a lot of long-term care facilities and i have a lot of treatment centers and initially they were like oh well we want the instant result and what would happen is they would use it

they'd think that the patient was negative and um especially with treatment centers they would let them go onto the main unit floor and they were actually positive but the rapid test didn't capture that so next thing you know they had a major outbreak so they have pivoted more to the pcr they're willing to wait an extra day

to get a more accurate result does that answer your question jeff yeah for sure cool that's just kind of real real world results that i'm that i'm seeing now there are some instances where they want an instant instant result i you know i always say you know that's fine do the instant result but always back it up

with a pcr test just in case yeah and just to build on aaron's point um you know looking at it through the lens that that i do you know working with employers you know really what it what i see a lot is is that employers just don't really know where to start what to do you know what

are other companies doing how do i interpret this you know thousand page regulation that you know that's out there what am what can i do what can i do what technology is out there and um you know so you know really trying to find a way to help you know they're starving for information um there's you know

they want to do the right thing they certainly want to comply with whatever rules are they certainly want to do right by their employees and their staff and they and their customers and you know and whatever the other stakeholders are within that organization and it's and it's been a lot of sort of scurrying around in the dark

um you know through this processes you know we've never cut we've you know never encountered anything like this before so i find that i find that piece interesting jeff as as we watched this happen over the last 20 or so months yeah and and uh to matt's point again you know a lot of a lot of my

customers they don't know what they don't know right so i had a customer a treatment center that we work with quite a bit and it was taking their current lab five six days to get it back and they thought that was actually good and so i was i had a conversation with them two weeks ago and told

them you know hey i could get you guys results next day and so it's it's it's always good to ask to see what else is out there because um you get a lot of these bigger labs that just can't handle the capacity um we actually can actually handle the capacity quite a bit we picked up a customer

that sends us about 2 000 specimens a day that was just one customer so from a capacity standpoint we can we can definitely take on the volume and and still not and still get the results out in a timely manner yeah you know it's interesting that you mentioned too that that you know um employers many organizations are

are struggling just to understand all the uh the regulations and uh you know and we're finding that even with some of the largest most sophisticated organizations we met recently with our advisory board which is comprised of occupational health physicians uh and and they were telling us that um you know hey we we have you know huge legal

and regulatory teams and and of course you know as as ak health professionals we're you know we're we stay on top of all of this but you know it it has changed with such regularity and in many cases the guidance that we're getting is conflicting isn't necessarily well thought out doesn't always match up with the science um

you know in many cases you'll get one agency telling you one thing and another agency telling you another thing and it's just it's all but impossible to uh uh you know to navigate so that's certainly been an issue that that is one common thread is it's uh you know i i kind of say we're kind of in

the wild west right you know it's just we're on the front lines and every day is different well you know back to back to this topic of uh uh you know we talked earlier about the about the vaccine mandates and as i said we've seen some clients of ours that you know oh well absent a mandate you

know especially if i'm not a you know not a not a health care facility um we can scale back on testing because it's no longer going to be you know part of the mandate strategy so what would your advice be to organizations that are thinking oh we we don't have to worry about testing anymore um you know

i i have um great question i have a couple that we had that conversation about and vaccine mandate or no vaccine mandate you still still want to test right um because the last thing you want to do is have an outbreak and then now you have to shut your facility down you know it's the government and payers

are reimbursing it so it's a really you know there's no cost being thrown over you know the insurance only pays you know a certain amount and you know the patient has to cover it's it's 100 percent covered which is unique usually insurance com companies don't want to cover anything um but you know they they they have implemented

just rigorous testing exp you know and i keep going back to what i know right my long-term care facilities and my treatment centers they they they have robust testing processes in place and it's helped them you know navigate major major outbreaks now had they backed down from the testing they would have had major outbreaks so um they've

just continued forward with these testing protocols yeah to build on aaron's point in that in the question that you asked jeff i mean one of the you know as far as mandate or no mandate um i mean certainly i mean what was the purpose of the mandate is they you know they want employers to be testing they

you know they want employers to be concerned about you know creating you know those those safe environments for for people to come to work i mean aaron touched on it a little bit like you know if you have an outbreak at work you know that's that can be business threatening for for a lot of companies that are

out there when you know if you have 30 of your workforce out you know because they have to quarantine or whatever you know and the other piece that we really don't know yet um and you know we and we won't for a while is you know do employers when they choose to do nothing right i mean if

they just say barry i'm going to bury my head in the sand i know this is an issue that's out there there are easy solutions out there we're just going to choose not to does does that create any liability you know if somebody were to you know get sick if somebody were to you know become disabled or

or you know god forbid die you know we don't know right um you know we can look at it through you know other similar type things um you know we don't want to um you know we don't want to we um you know sorry i lost my word here you know but but you know when we look

at an applicant you know we don't want to make decisions about their past you know we just you know we need them in there we're not going to look for this information we're not going to drug test we're not going to you know do discriminate we're not going to discriminate based on these types of things well you

know there are lots of lawsuits that go out on negligent hiring and you know should you have known and could you have known and how easy is it for you to get access to that information um and it's you know it's really created a whole cottage industry of of you know lawsuits and and uh you know ambulance

chasing lawyers we don't know what's going to happen you know with that i mean it's certainly something that potentially could could come down the road um so as an employer like you know do you want to you know how what is your philosophy on that i think that's one of the questions that employers have to ask themselves

gotcha yeah and you know it's interesting you you mentioned the you know i think if an employer does nothing and and you know doesn't have the ability to show um you know good faith efforts to manage through this that's where you can get into into trouble i know for us as for enterprise health as we realized that

that we would be subject to the to the safer federal agency mandate um you know had it gone forward uh you know as we as we dug into that and worked with our you know legal counsel to to figure out what you know what do we have to do and and um you know how do we how

do we manage all of this and one of the things that became very clear was you know you you really have to demonstrate a good faith effort and and that's part of what we told our employees we said look you know we we need to understand you know everyone's vaccination status and and you know and and if

you're not vaccinated you know there there are exemption pathways but part of this is you know we we have to be able to show that we put in place a good faith effort to uh to navigate all of this so so you know and again as we said these are the same things that our clients are having

to having to wrestle with so we have to do it as well yeah um one other question um and and you you know you you brought up that already that um you know like turnaround time on results has been an issue and and i know we always hear from our clients when they talk about you know uh

about lab vendors you know they they kind of point to the obvious things like you know well we we consider costs we consider accuracy we consider turnaround time when we're selecting a lab partner um but i'm i'm wondering has how has covid maybe affected uh some of these criteria and and are there you know other considerations that

organizations should be looking at you know in in in light of this pandemic or overall i know i know one of the things you men uh you mentioned was um just just capacity uh but you know but what what other what other factors should uh should uh businesses be thinking about when they select a lab yeah um

good question you know i think the the most i mean you hit on them right the most important ones are you know turn around time right and then how easy is the um collection process you know how can i access my results um is it easy do they have a you know patient friendly web portal where i

can get on there and access it you know am i am i getting those results in a timely manner um and then you know because you have a lot of labs that'll tell you yeah yeah yeah we'll take it we'll take it we'll take it well you know it now it's taking me six seven eight days to

get my results well that does me no good because by the time i get my results i'm out of quarantine so what's the point of doing it right so you know that's kind of where drug scan steps in and and says look we can give you quick turnaround time uh cost effective and um easily you know our

web platforms accessing results is super simple so you know uh and we make the collection process easy so you know when employers think oh you know i've got a test and oh man this is going to be hard no it's it's actually you know we can come in and train whoever needs to be trained it's super simple

just a quick nasal pharyngeal swab you put it in a tube ship it off we get it next day you should have your results within nine hours um you know and and that's big um actually flipped a couple customers over to us and they were blown away at how quick they were getting their pcr testing uh results

back which is which is huge you know you know you you want those results as quickly as possible so then you can determine okay this person has to quarantine or no this this patient doesn't um again you know i keep using current customers of mine i had a treatment center that got really relaxed on their covet testing

and they had two outbreaks and what that does is now they can't take on any new um patients coming into their treatment center because they're on a lockdown for an extended period of time so and at the end of the day that that hurts them from a revenue standpoint so um they learned that lesson uh real quick

and got more involved in a more robust uh testing regimen yeah i mean i i think just looking at things from my perspective as an employer when you consider it is some of the employers that i've talked to they they keep they continue to think of it through the framework of what the mandate would have required them

to do and and then it becomes like well i i can't do that or i don't want to do that or that that you know that's too much and it's well you know in the absence of the mandate you actually have more ability to be creative in you know what you build for your you know for your

testing or for your organization so you know it could be as simple as you know we we want to just give our employees access to tests because you know if they if we leave them to their own devices because somebody that they worked with you know tested positive and they want to know they don't really know where

to go you know and it could take forever to get a result but as the organization if they could sponsor a way for somebody to get you know tested quickly and get the results fast as aaron pointed out they can you know get that peace of mind and get back to work and you know and then you

reduce the amount of you know contact tracing quarantining that has to get done and uh you know exposure quarantining that you know still happening in many employers uh you know around the country right now so you know maybe isn't you know test everybody who's not vaccinated every week like the mandate would have been but it could be

like hey we've had a positive you know our contact tracing is going to require a test for these three employees um so you know you can you can really just sit back and and say like how do what what do we want to do what what what can we build what what makes sense for our organization and

build something around that yeah aaron would you agree with that yeah i was going to say you make a great point i i think the the basis of that is there's just a lot of confusion right you know where do i go what what test do i use and so basically what what we're here for is to

help you guys in whatever you need right do you need a quick test do would you prefer a pcr you know i have a lot of people that are around me personally and you know they have a an outbreak in the house and that like they have no idea where to go they can't go to walmart they

can't go to cvs they're out they're out you know it just gives you it just gives you know your your employers just uh ease of mind knowing that okay well hey we've got drug scan as an option to help us if we decide that we need to offer testing to our employees we can we can develop a

program that best suits what you guys need we're not going to dictate to tell you what you did what to do we'll help you accomplish what you need to do gotcha okay well and and thank you guys i know uh you know some and so much of what we've been talking about and and most of our webinars

over the last 18 months have sort of been uh focused largely on covid uh really obviously out of necessity uh we look forward to the day where where that's not kind of the the the the driving force for a lot of this content uh and we can you know maybe go back to talking about routine testing but

i will say it was really interesting that you guys you brought up sort of the great resignation um and and the impact that that's having on hiring and and you talked a little bit about some of the things that you guys do around you know uh drug and alcohol screening and and and just pre-employment screening uh so

i'll use that just to pitch uh for everybody uh our next webinar and in in addition to these longer form webinars where we bring in clients and partners to talk uh one of the things that we've heard is is uh people would love to have some just shorter webinars that are very specific about you know some of

our functionality so we've got one ironically coming up here on february 23rd from 1 to 1 30 pm eastern and we're going to talk about some of the ways that uh we're simplifying the management of random drug and alcohol testing uh within the enterprise health platform um and and again most of our clients are doing pre-employment screening

most of them are doing you know randomized testing and um and over over the years we've we've received a lot of feedback from our client community on how we could improve that capability within our product we've recently made some uh some new uh development changes and done a little bit of innovation work uh r d work and

uh so we're gonna uh spend some time just demoing and talking about that capability and then and then answering questions so uh we'll be sending out um registration information and promotion of that webinar coming up here um uh very soon but um you know we're we're right at the hour mark and uh and again i know we

had 90 minutes allocated but we also recognize everybody is still very very busy these days anybody involved in occupational and employee health so we'll rap a little bit early but again want to thank the the folks from uh from drug scan aaron and matt uh really really appreciate your time and your comments and as always thanks to

everybody who uh who attended today's webinar you know we we recognize your time is valuable and we appreciate you spending some of it with us uh and again we will uh we will send out a link to uh to a recording of this uh here within the next few days so thanks everybody and please stay stay safe

and stay healthy