Uncovering More Than 860,000 Available Work Hours for a Large Healthcare System

When a large health system came to us as a new customer, they had an important question:

Let’s answer this by exploring their experience since they decided in early 2019 to consolidate their pre-employment drug and health screening program with us. They came to us with three main goals:

1. Significantly reduce the time from a candidate accepting the offer to Day One
2. Address compliance requirements across federal, state, and local levels
3. Deliver a superior candidate experience

We took over the management of their drug screening (10-panel and expanded opiates testing) as well as their health screening (TB blood tests, as well as varicella, measles, mumps, rubella, and hepatitis B titers) in February 2019.

Let’s take a look at how we partnered with this customer to achieve each goal.

Goal #1: Reduce time from offer acceptance to Day One

We were able to reduce the average time from “offer accepted” to start from an average of over four weeks (22 business days) to under two weeks, with an average turnaround time for each candidate’s background check and drug & health screening services to 3.3 days. Even during the peak of Covid disruption, turnaround time remained under five days.

Making a candidate productive up to 12 business days faster, assuming 8-hour shifts, is 96 extra hours per candidate. Multiply that by the 9,000 candidates that our customer screens in a year, and the result is 864,000 extra working hours. Of course, our customer might not be able to start a candidate the day they are cleared to work, so it’s impossible to be precise with the hours saved. Given ongoing healthcare talent shortages, however, “finding” even a fraction of these hours is consequential.

How exactly did we reduce the turnaround time so dramatically? Our pre-employment health screening services use advanced technology and a unique concierge service model that balances candidate experience and proactive results tracking. Our concierge service consolidates a potentially confusing process and provides a single point of contact for our customers and their candidates. With over 17,000 collection and clinics sites nationwide, our concierge swiftly registers candidates at convenient locations, ensuring flexibility and options.

Equally important, the concierge’s work continues by aggressively chasing results, helping to speed up testing and reporting.

Goal #2: Provide consultative information on compliance with federal and state laws, role by role

Our customer was nervous that specific requirements for candidates were occasionally falling through the cracks in their old process. For example, they would discover belatedly that a candidate had not provided proof of a negative tuberculosis result before starting work. Tracking these requirements was complex, because our customer operates in multiple states, and each state and role has its own requirements.

First Advantage was able to develop customer-created clinical and non-clinical packages for each state and role and configured them in the customer’s ATS (Workday) to make things more seamless and automated, reducing the potential for human error.

The benefits were significant:

• Increased focus on compliance while reducing administrative burden
• Cost reduction by eliminating the ordering of unnecessary services
• Peace of mind with tools and processes that are designed with compliance in mind
• Access to compliance and healthcare-specific experts to provide consultative information and share best practice information

Goal #3: Deliver a better candidate experience

Completing all required drug and health screens can be time-consuming and stressful for candidates, and improving this experience was a priority for our customer.

Historically, our customer had two options:

1. Require candidates to go to one central employee health location, often with long commutes and limited appointment times
2. Sending candidates to multiple locations for different tests, and then experiencing results delays

Having a dedicated First Advantage Concierge team has greatly enhanced the candidate experience in the following ways:

• The Concierge team welcomes and guides the candidate through each step
• Candidates get assistance finding a convenient location that can complete all required services at one time
• The Concierge team registers the candidate and ensures clinic readiness.
• Implementation of a paperless experience
• Because the Concierge team proactively chases results, candidates experience a faster “offer accepted” to Day One experience

Conclusion

Best of all, perhaps, our customer’s Employee Health departments are now able to focus entirely on employees. We have taken the burden of pre-employment and employee health screening off of their plates and helped them meet their screening goals.