COVID-19PANDEMIC: The Lab Industry Response & How to Protect Your Employees

Dear Lab Professional:

The global COVID-19 pandemic came without warning and is having a seismic impact on labs and the diagnostics business.

The imperative for the industry right now is to develop a safe and rapid method of reliably detecting the virus, preferably at the point of care.

But the first imperative for individual labs is to protect the workplace.

Protecting lab employees from infection is a legal imperative. Implementing emergency response measures to minimize potential disruptions due to a COVID-19 pandemic is a business imperative.

To meet these challenges, labs and test companies will have to handle sensitive medical information about patients and cases. While the usual HIPAA and other privacy restrictions apply, special information sharing rules pertain during public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here’s What Your Lab Needs to Know about the COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Your Emergency Special Report takes a close look at what’s happening right now with COVID-19 testing, including relevant FDA, CDC, and CMS policies and guidelines, and the specific patient and employee health and privacy protections that your lab must have in place. Here’s a closer look at what your Emergency Special Report covers:

• Part I: Scramble to Create a COVID-19 Test: looks at the government response to COVID-19 and the efforts to ensure that reliable tests capable of detecting the virus become available as soon as possible.
• Part II: The US Response: looks at the private sector response and the efforts of test companies around the world to develop new tests for COVID-19
• Part III: Patient Privacy During the COVID019
  Pandemic: looks at the impact of COVID-19 on individual labs from a risk management perspective and lays out a practical strategy for preventing infection and the legal liability that may result
• Part IV: How to Protect Your Workers: looks at the challenge of complying with privacy laws in the course of implementing COVID-19 response measures, focusing on the privacy rights of both lab employees and patients.

Special Bonus:
Your Emergency Special Report also includes practical, ready-to-use “working tools” you can use to implement the strategies and “how-to” game plans laid out in your Special Report, including a Model COVID-19 Infection Control Policy, Model COVID-19 Briefing for Employees, Model COVID-19 Briefing for Lab Managers, and Model COVID-19 Screening Form.