The Health, Safety & Environment Division and Health and Employee Wellness (HEW) have been working with Axion, Argonne’s electronic health records vendor, since January to improve the medical surveillance and certification process, including development of new email notifications tied to due dates. Medical surveillances and certifications are presently mapped to questions in Argonne’s Job and Hazard Questionnaire (JHQ) system. Over the last month, the mapping and notification improvements have been tested by Axion and are now ready for release.
Users of My Health will experience these new functions:
- Automated “due next month” and “due this month” email notifications concerning medical surveillances and certifications, sent to both employees and supervisors in advance of expiration dates.
- Automatic reset of surveys that apply to current surveillances and certifications in the My Health system at the time when the “due next month” email is sent (eliminating the need to call HEW to reset manually).
- Email notification to employees and supervisors, prompting survey completions and medical appointments, when JHQ questions indicate the need for medical surveillance or certification. There will also be automatic activations of associated health surveys in the My Health portal.
- Email notification to employee and supervisor informing them that the employee is being removed from a medical surveillance or certification program, when a JHQ question that is mapped to a medical surveillance or certification becomes unchecked. This will result in automatic deactivation of associated health surveys in the My Health portal and “Not in Program” status automatically registered in the compliance area of My Health. Before the upgrade, this was a manual process.
- Replacement of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)-U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) certification with new individual medical surveillance and certification for each hazardous chemical to create awareness of what the medical surveillance is actually linked to. Previously, OSHA-DOE certification covered multiple hazardous chemicals as a group, which staff shared was difficult to understand.
Example: The employee checks JHQ question C6.1 indicating they work with “Acrylonitrile” on their JHQ. Before, this would have triggered just an OSHA-DOE certification — now it will specify “OSHA-DOE Acrylonitrile.” This will make the triggering process more transparent to the employee and the supervisor both with respect to the email notifications and in the supervisor’s My Health portal showing compliance reporting.
HEW staff will also have access to new reporting and email capabilities to help streamline work processes.
We encourage supervisors to use the supervisor tab in the My Health portal to view the compliance status of their reports. We also encourage Environment, Safety and Health coordinators and those who have access to the reporting tab to explore this functionality and observe these updates.
Employees can check their certification status in the My Health portal using their Argonne credentials.
As with any launch, test systems do not fully represent live integrated systems, so employees may experience some bugs or glitches. Please contact me or any of the HEW staff at medical@anl.gov to report problems. We will be testing the system in the live environment before the holiday break to identify potential issues. The vendor will perform fixes, if needed, over the break and we expect the system to be up and running smoothly in January.
During January, when we are assured the system is working properly, HEW will notify non-compliant status employees and supervisors with instructions on how to proceed.