Employers Scramble to Adhere to White House Vaccine Mandate as OSHA Gets Closer to Nationwide Implementation

WILMINGTON, N.C., Oct. 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Businesses, colleges, and universities with 100+ employees are making last-ditch efforts to express concerns to the White House about uncertainty on how to verify their employees' vaccination status in order to adhere to new COVID-19 workplace rules. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is currently reviewing text of an emergency vaccine rule submitted recently by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that carries fines up to $14,000 per violation of the complex mandate.

The emergency rule is the linchpin of the White House's six-pronged action plan for increasing COVID-19 vaccinations throughout organizations across the nation in a plethora of industries including health care and higher education. With OSHA another step closer to fully implementing the vaccine mandate, HR professionals are faced with timely challenges to collect and validate documentation related to vaccinations and legally permissible waivers across entire workforces, without violating federal, state, and international data privacy laws.

Questions to be answered by employers in coming days include:

• Who received a vaccine and when?
• Which vaccine was it?
• Is a booster required?
• For those who don't have the vaccine, do they have a legally permissible waiver?

Releasing its first COVID-19 solution in April 2020 to help organizations mitigate risk, CastleBranch has identified another stumbling block for these large employers. If the company's vaccination record review process is not carefully documented, creating a secure audit trail, they may be at risk for thousands of dollars in fines per incident in the event of an alleged violation, putting that company's economic survival in jeopardy.

In response to this client need, CastleBranch created RealVaccinationID.com providing digital and physical proof of COVID-19 vaccination status while helping companies create a secure audit trail. RealVaccination ID is a main element of CastleBranch's Essential Tool Kit, which includes diagnostic test tracking, a service the company has been providing for tracking other medical documents for decades.

Building a reliable audit trail of weekly test results to help organizations stay on track with vaccine and testing mandates, create a full audit trail, and avoid fines, it can be paired with RealVaccinationID.com for safe, secure, and convenient proof of vaccination, boosters, and waivers. The Essential Tool Kit features easy-to-access reporting capabilities and data exporting via secure cloud-based platforms to reduce heavy administrative burdens, helping employers implement a robust vaccine and testing mandate ? all in strict compliance with complex government privacy regulations.

CastleBranch, an infectious disease screening company with more than 20 years of experience, built this Essential Tool Kit with inspiration and guidance from some of the world's leading epidemiologists and pandemic disease policy experts. It's also been endorsed by both the Organization for Associate Degree Nursing (OADN) and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), the nation's two largest nursing healthcare associations, representing more than 80 percent of nursing education in the country.

For more information, visit the CB Real Vaccination ID resource page.

About CastleBranch:
Located in Wilmington, N.C., CastleBranch is one of the leading providers of vaccination, immunization tracking and diagnostic test tracking in the United States. With 25 years' experience, the company has collected, reviewed, and/or stored over 35 million medical documents for a majority of healthcare education programs across the nation. Their applications are designed to maintain strict compliance with state and federal privacy regulations; create a detailed audit trail along every step of the process; and to help organization handle the logistics of implementing a complex vaccine mandate at scale.

SOURCE CastleBranch