In workplaces where employees are exposed to airborne hazards, ensuring proper respiratory protection is not just a best practice — it’s a necessity. Respirators play a critical role in safeguarding workers from harmful particles, chemicals and infectious agents. But simply providing respirators to employees is not enough; ensuring that they fit properly is essential for them to be effective.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) mandates annual fit testing for employees required to wear tight-fitting respirators. Additionally, new hires, employees who switch respirator models, or those who experience facial changes all require additional testing. Compliance with these regulations helps organizations avoid hefty fines and, more importantly, protects worker health and safety.
For organizations with a large number of employees, tracking, scheduling and conducting fit tests can be a time-consuming and tedious process. Users of Enterprise Health, a comprehensive EHR solution for occupational and employee health (OEHR), benefit from medical surveillance functionality and employee portals that simplify compliance tracking, send automatic reminders for annual testing and ease reporting, and now, new functionality that streamlines data entry at mass fit events.
Streamline data entry at mass fit events
Workers often have varied schedules, making it difficult to bring everyone in for testing within a set timeframe. Additionally, some employees may not fully understand the importance of fit testing, leading to reluctance or resistance in participating. One way large organizations make it easy for employees to remain up to date with their tests is by holding mass fit testing events, similar to mass flu shot events.
To speed data entry during these events, Enterprise Health recently debuted a new feature that enables clinicians to key in respirator fit test data from one screen. With this functionality, clinicians no longer need to search for and open individual employee health charts to enter data. Instead, the clinician can pull up a mass entry screen and use a patient search field to select a specific employee. Information about the employee’s fit test, including mask identification, size and type is entered on the mass entry screen. The last fit test date, expiration date and pass/fail status is also recorded. All of this data automatically populates the employee’s health record when saved. Then the clinician is ready for the next patient.
Respirator fit testing is a critical component of workplace safety, and ensures that employees receive the respiratory protection they need to perform their jobs safely. Large-scale testing events can be effective in helping organizations maintain a safe and compliant work environment, and Enterprise Health’s mass data entry method streamlines the process even more.
See a list of other top features Enterprise Health clients depend on to keep their employee populations healthy and productive here, or contact us today to see how this functionality can speed data entry at your mass fitting events.
