What happened: Appnovation has been commissioned to help employers ensure health-care workers aren’t at multiple long-term care facilities
Why it matters: The move helps prevent the spread of COVID-19 to some of the province’s most vulnerable populations
Recent provincial orders restricting B.C. health-care staff from working at multiple long-term care facilities might appear like a case of easier said than done.
But the logistics of collecting employment data and mapping out exactly who this applies to is being facilitated by a Vancouver tech firm that managed the first phase of the feat in a few days.
Appnovation Technologies Inc. was commissioned late last month by the Ministry of Health and the Provincial Health Officer to support B.C.’s new single-site staffing initiative.
Health-care workers often work at multiple care homes, raising the risk of COVID-19 being spread from facility to facility.
It’s of critical concern as coronavirus-related deaths in the province have been skewing heavily towards those in long-term care facilities.
“There is very little transparency as to the staffing of those facilities and how the staff mixes across [multiple] sites,” said Iain MacNeil, Appnovation’s chief revenue officer.
“It’s one thing to move a worker from two sites to one, but it’s that much harder to ensure quality of care at that site they left.”
To help maintain quality of care, MacNeil’s team began analyzing staffing data on about 100,000 employees and 160,000 job records.
Appnovation then began mapping out multi-site worker movements, feeding it back to the health authorities responsible for implementing the province’s orders.
The government orders, which were made March 26-27, are meant to limit workers movements at both public and private facilities.
MacNeil said the goal was to illuminate “blind spots” for employers, such as staff overlaps into private facilities, overlaps between contractors and overlaps between other health authorities.
Appnovation also created a website for multi-site workers allowing them to register their preferred worksite (the government is providing a top-up to ensure workers don't experience financial hardship as a result of the new order.).
“It’s enabling the employers of the province to clearly see the work ahead of them and then implement it intelligently,” he said.
Appnovation was able to begin securely collecting data in about five days following an initial conversation with the province March 21.
The analytics phase then began three days after the launch and the company is now in talks with authorities in Alberta about implementing the same services across the Rockies.
“The solution itself was actually intentionally designed to be agnostic across provinces with the expectation that other provinces would be following,” MacNeil said.
