RightCrowd helps California employers meet AB 685 COVID-19 exposure reporting requirements

COVID-19 Workplace Contact Tracing Reporting
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RightCrowd helps California employers meet AB 685 COVID-19 exposure reporting requirements

California AB 685 imposes new reporting requirements on employers regarding COVID-19 cases in the workplace. The new law also provides California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA) authority to close workplaces based on the threat of COVID-19.  Here are five ways RightCrowd can help California employers efficiently meet the new requirements, keep their workers safe and stay operational.

1. Accurate COVID-19 Exposure Reporting

The new law requires employers who receive a notice of potential workplace exposure to COVID-19 to provide a written notice to employees and contractors within one day of notice of potential exposure to a qualifying individual’.

Accurate, timely exposure reporting is going to be critical. 

RightCrowd Contact Tracing delivers rapid and accurate COVID-19 exposure reporting for all employees, contractors, vendors and visitors enabled with the RightCrowd Social Distancing Monitoring solution across the workplace. 

Close contact information is recorded and stored on the RightCrowd Badgeholder, which is automatically transferred to the backend software as soon as the person comes in range of a RightCrowd Gateway. Through an easy-to-use dashboard, RightCrowd quickly delivers up-to-date COVID-19 exposure reporting.

starter kit for social distancing solution
RightCrowd’s Social Distancing & Contact Tracing solution for the workplace.

2. Targeted Worksite Reporting

AB 685 amends the California Labor Code to permit Cal-OSHA to close workplaces that ”constitute an imminent hazard to employees” due to COVID-19.  The closure of a workplace must be limited to the immediate area that the ”imminent hazard exists,” and Cal-OSHA cannot prohibit entry to any areas that are outside of the hazard area.

Employers will want to accurately identify the worksites in which exposures took place, and the dates and times they occurred.

RightCrowd Social Distancing Monitoring solutions can be configured to meet the needs of small and large workplaces. The addition of a RightCrowd Gateway to a worksite delivers more granular exposure reporting across the workplace. System users can accurately identify exposed employees, contractors and visitors by worksite, date and time.   

3. Notifying Employees and Contractors

Within one business day of receiving a notice of potential exposure, an employer must provide written notice to all employees, and to the employers of subcontracted employees, ”who were on the premises at the same worksite as the qualifying individual within the infectious period, that they may have been exposed” to COVID-19.

The notice should be hand delivered or sent by email or text, as long as the notice can reasonably be expected to be received by the employee within one business day of sending. It must be in English and in the language understood by the majority of the employees in the workplace.

RightCrowd delivers an accurate COVID-19 exposure report fast, that can be used by employers to meet their notification requirements. Privacy settings can be configured to ensure that all reporting meets employer’s obligations under the California Consumer Privacy Act.

4. Notifying Local Health Authorities

AB 685 requires that an employer notify the local public health agency within 48 hours if the number of positive COVID-19 cases meets the definition of an ”outbreak” as defined by California Department of Public Health (CDPH). This notice must include the names, number, occupation, and worksite of the employees, and the business address and North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code of the worksite.

RightCrowd Contact Tracing helps employers meet their obligations to notify local health authorities, by providing an easy report of who was exposed in the workplace, across time and worksite based parameters.

APIs allow RightCrowd Contact Tracing to communicate with other applications in your business. This allows close contact data to be exported to and enrich security or HR applications. The business can then configure their existing IT tools to meet their exposure reporting obligations, accurately and fast.

Monitoring close social distance in the office
Close contact events are stored in each RightCrowd Bluetooth Badgeholder to monitor safe social distancing and offers rapid contact tracing.

5. Compliance Reporting

Employers are required under the new law to keep records of the written notices provided to employees for at least three years. The solution also helps employers provide evidence of the steps they have taken to notify exposed people and Health Authorities, in compliance with California AB 685. Using advanced database technology and cloud storage, the solution can be configured to support the organization’s data retention, compliance and privacy requirements.

Contact Tracing Solution For Workplaces
RightCrowd Contact Tracing Dashboards
Detailed reporting is available to understand the state of social distancing across the workforce and to quickly take action in case of a COVID-19 infection of one of your workers.

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