Navigating Covid-19 has been difficult from the start for everyone. While some companies begin to return to work, the decision-making process hasn’t gotten any easier as various rules and regulations continue to be released. Thursday, September 9 President Biden announced that “The Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration is developing a rule requiring all employers with at least 100 employees to make sure their workforce is fully vaccinated or require unvaccinated workers to get a negative test at least once a week”. Regardless of how you plan to return to the office, your benefits administration system should be flexible to help you execute your plans and comply with these new regulations. We’ve rounded up and answered some of your most frequently asked questions regarding how vaccine tracking and surcharge administration will work within the PlanSource system.

The PlanSource platform has customizable survey capabilities that can facilitate capturing this from employees during an enrollment event (e.g. new hire enrollment, life events and open enrollment). Customers can create a custom survey question that allows you to ask whether the employee is vaccinated. Then depending on the response, the system can calculate a surcharge or update the employee’s medical premium contribution. The vaccination question is inserted into the workflow either before or after the employee makes their medical selection, depending on how the surcharge needs to be applied.

With both survey options, you can require employees to upload an image of their vaccination card to indicate whether they are vaccinated through our document request functionality. In addition, the medical benefit can pend until HR has approved the proof of vaccination. This review feature is incorporated into the existing document approval dashboard making it a familiar process for HR teams.

Since the survey is customizable, you can create follow-up questions based on employee answers. For example, if an employee responds “No” to the question “Have you been vaccinated?”, an additional question can be prompted to ask if they have one of the following exemptions in a list they can select from. You can also include an electronic signature from the employee attesting to their responses.

Yes, employees can take the survey and upload an image of their vaccination card within the browser experience or on their mobile devices. The mobile capability makes taking and uploading vaccination proof more convenient for employees.

Additionally, HR teams can send out automatic reminders via text message to employees to remind them to complete this task. They can create a QR code that links to the benefits login page for employees to scan then authenticate and complete the proof of vaccination process.

If you’ve already compiled your employee’s vaccination status, you can still add that to the PlanSource system. Just upload a file with each employee’s status to the system and the surcharges can be applied.

The configuration time will vary by customer depending on their requirements and whether they are including this feature as part of their broader changes needed for open enrollment or as a mid-year change to their platform. For more information, reach out to your PlanSource contact.

PlanSource is SSAE-16 audited and ISO-270001 certified. Our cyber security and encryption for this survey feature match that of the rest of the platform. Additionally, multi-factor authentication is supported and can be enabled for employees and/or HR professionals.

And remember, if you have any more questions or wish to set up a survey you can reach out directly to your PlanSource contact. We’re here to help!