Chamber Webinar Outlines a Safe Return to Work

BY BENJAMIN FANG

As companies contemplate returning to offices during the era of coronavirus, one New York City company is providing services that allow employees to safely go back to work.

In a webinar hosted by the Queens Chamber of Commerce, Andrew Shulman, CEO of MobileHealth, talked about how his company is providing screenings and COVID-19 tests for companies in the five boroughs.

MobileHealth, which has seven clinics in New York City, including one on Queens Boulevard in Rego Park, has been around for 35 years. It screens 200,000 employees a year, Shulman said, and the majority of its clients are also in the health care field.

“We’ve been doing antibody testing before antibody testing was cool,” he said. “This is our area of expertise.”

When COVID-19 first struck the city in March, Shulman said the company was focused on respirator fit testing. Health care organizations called on MobileHealth to make sure employees, visitors and frontline workers were properly fitted to wear N-95 masks.

Within four weeks, the company had done 20,000 respirator fit tests. By the end of April, Shulman said his company started looking at what’s next, particularly for employers in New York City and nationally.

That’s when MobileHealth created a new system meant to bring employees back to the office. Shulman said there are three major components to the system they put in place: an online questionnaire for symptom monitoring, a temperature screening and COVID-19 testing.

“While we created this service to be a full suite of services, we came to find out organizations are at different points of re-entry,” he said. “We had to create a system that was more piecemeal.”

For the online questionnaire, the company sends out a text message with customizable questions, which checks employees for symptoms like fever, cough or loss of smell or taste. The questionnaire can also be sent to employees based on their shift or department, without having to download anything.

Once the questionnaire is complete, employees will receive a QR code. If they fail the test, they get a message with a “large X.” If they pass, they will be sent a code that can be presented to someone at the front door doing the screenings.

Andrew Shulman, CEO of MobileHealth, described his company’s new system to help employees return to work.

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