FAQ #32 September 25, 2020 from CEO Conference Call 9/23
FAQ #32: September 25th, 2020 — Containing Answers from September 23rd
Answers to Staff Questions on Employee Health and Safety, Patient Care, HR Policies, and Return to Work
The following FAQs were adapted from questions submitted by VNSNY staff for the CEO Conference Calls hosted by Marki Flannery on Wednesday, September 23rd.
Employee Health and Safety
This pertains to daily COVID health assessments. If the daily COVID health assessment could be shortened as the entire process takes 5 minutes of each of our mornings to complete, it would be greatly appreciated.
So I complete this every morning, because I’m in the office each day. And I found that, to me, it does not take 5 minutes. It’s probably all of a minute to be able to go through. But I’m going to ask Marian if she can respond to this.
Marian Haas, Chief Human Resources Officer: Yes. Other employees have had the same experience as you described, Marki. We did ask HR Connect to follow up with the person who asked this specific question. There may be an issue with access or the device that they’re using, or the responsiveness of the device to Workday. So we’re trying to troubleshoot that with the person who asked this question.
Is the flu voucher available to all of my family members who are covered under my health plan?
Marian Haas: Unfortunately, no. The flu voucher is only intended for employees. If your family members are covered under your plan, the flu shot would certainly be covered under your regular health insurance coverage, whether you got it at CVS or your family practitioner, or any other area where it’s available.
I only found an expired CVS flu voucher with an expiration date of March 31, 2020. Where can I find an updated voucher?
Marian, do you – can you direct how to find the most updated voucher?
Marian Haas: Yes. If you click on the banner on the Intranet landing page, it will take you directly to a page that has links for the pharmacy vouchers, CVS, Walgreens, Duane Reade.
I believe what may have happened, this person may have just searched for flu voucher, and old ones that still are on SharePoint, although they are expired, and they have come up. But if you use that landing page template, you will go right to the link to Duane Reade or CVS.
How many employees currently have COVID in the past month? Are they in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Westchester, or Manhattan?
So I know that the last couple of weeks there weren’t any positives, and then this week, as I mentioned, we had three. Of course, there are still some people who are COVID positive from a prior time who are continuing to improve. But maybe, Tony, you might have some additional information than I just shared?
Tony Dawson, Vice President of Quality and Customer Experience: So we track the number of COVID positive employees who call us on a weekly basis. And we review that on this call every week. And as Marki said, we had a couple of weeks where we had nobody. And then this week we had three positive employees.
We track on the CERT team which branch they come from and where their disposition is. And some people test positive and do extremely well, some people test positive and are out for a number of weeks. That’s protected information that we keep between the employees and us, so that we can track and trend that data.
Please add the plan ID number to the Walgreens pharmacy flue voucher. I went to the Walgreens pharmacy in Valley Stream and the pharmacist was insisting that the plan ID was required. I printed the flu voucher to the Walgreens pharmacy in Valley Stream in Long Island, the pharmacist did not want to accept the voucher because the VNSNY plan ID number was missing, and was requesting my social security number, which I refused to provide. I provided my employee ID number instead.
Does this sound right to you, Marian, or is this a confused pharmacy perhaps?
Marian Haas: Yes. It may be a confused pharmacy. We have found that some of the pharmacy practices are different. But we will check that voucher to see if we can add the VNSNY plan ID to that Walgreens voucher. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.\
Return to Work
Employees who have children who are doing remote learning, will those parents still be able to work remote some days to help their children if they don’t have extra support?
We are definitely looking at how we can support these employees. Where there are roles that must be full time in the office, we may not be able to provide that support. But the majority of our roles can be shared, part time in the office and working remotely on other days. Your managers can work with you on addressing that.
HR Policies / Pay and PTO Policies
Will VNSNY participate in the payroll tax holiday? On August 28th, the IRS issued a notice allowing employers to suspend withholding and paying to the IRS eligible employees social security payroll taxes as part of COVID relief.
This holiday or suspension period runs from September 1 through December 31 and applies only to employees whose wages are less than
$4000 for a biweekly pay period, including salaried workers earning less than $104,000. Companies that suspend collection of employee payroll tax would have to collect additional amounts from worker’s checks from January 1 through April 30th of next year to repay the tax obligation.
We have made a decision about this, and Marian will share that decision, which I believe has also been sent out via email.
Marian Haas: Yes. This is Marian Haas from Human Resources. A notice went out today from Human Resources explaining that we made a decision not to participate in this so-called tax holiday or suspension period. We did not think it made sense for our employees or VNSNY to put off this payroll deduction and contribution for social security until next year when it would have to be collected in the first quarter. So we will not be participating in this plan.
I realize that we can use commuter benefits for services like Uber and Lyft. However, we can only use it for pool services in which multiple people can ride in the same vehicle.
Considering that social distancing is now in effect for safety reasons, and Uber and Lyft have suspended their pool services, is there a way that we can use these commuter benefits without using a pool?
Marian Haas: I wish there were a way. It certainly makes sense that we can’t be socially distant and use pool services like Lyft and Uber. Unfortunately, the use of commuter benefits is governed by the IRS, and it seems that pool services are not limited in all parts of the country.
So, in New York, we cannot use commuter benefits to pay for Uber and Lyft services.
We put a question in to our WageWorks administrator as well as into our other consultants, and unfortunately, right now there doesn’t seem to be any action to change this for areas like ours where pool services are suspended. If we get any information that this changes, we will certainly let everybody know.
I’m not sure if I missed this information at another time, but did we receive our 2% increase? I know that it was mentioned that we would receive it in July.
The 2% increase was in fact implemented in the beginning of July. I want to remind everyone that this increase is for the non-union staff. The staff who are covered under a collective bargaining agreement received their increases in accordance with the terms of their collective bargaining agreement. This increase that was implemented in July was the one that we were going to implement on April 1st, and we deferred it until July.
So, Marian can follow up with this person to make sure that they didn’t get missed in the interim. Is that okay with you, Marian?
Marian Haas: We have already done so, and the person did receive the increase and that has been advised.
I heard you can donate unused commuter benefits. If that’s true, can you tell us where and how we can do this?
Marian, do you know anything about this?
Marian Haas: I have not heard that you can donate unused commuter benefits. But I will look into that for everyone and let you know.
Patient Care and Clinical
I work on call and I hear constant complaints from patients and family members over not getting through to the office in a timely manner, or holding on too long, sometimes 15 minutes, only to get the call to drop. Can calling into the office be more streamlined?
Michael Bernstein, Chief Administrative Officer: I first want to say this question is really important to address and appreciate the fact that it was sent in, and encourage everybody who is seeing a similar thing not to be concerned about sharing it, because this is not a situation that is lost on us as an organization. We have suffered at some level from people, patients and members not being able to get through to us in the office and also for being on hold a long time or for calls dropping.
So what are we doing about it? Well, the first thing is we have initiated something we are referring to as the “contact center shared services” program, and we hired Dan Wallis, our VP of Contact Center Shared Services, who joined us in March, in order for us to wrap our heads around all of this and get better.
And one of the first things that we undertook was an extensive search for the right what is called “telephony platform”, the right software, in order to ensure that we have a much more efficient way to handle the income calls. And we’re at the final stages with the implementation for that new platform to occur this fall.
And additionally, we are working to create a new structure where we can provide learning, development and quality measurements, service excellence, workforce management, the kinds of shared service skills that will make us better at handling incoming calls effectively and create a better patient and family member experience.
And lastly, we’re also working on trying to really address what causes these people to call us in the first place. Because, to the extent that we can provide information to them proactively and reduce their need to make a call into our office and be put on hold or a call drop, we are also going to create a better experience.
So, thank you for the question. This is a very important area of focus for us this year and into next year, and ongoing.
Do our weekly meetings, which we have most times twice per week, counts toward our productivity? This is our work time and will make sense if they’re counted as well towards productivity.
So I think this question is probably best for Andria. I’m not sure if you can respond to this question.
Andria Castellanos, Chief of Provider Services: We recognize that COVID has taken more time or I’ll call it, unproductive patient time. So, for example, if you’re taking care of a COVID patient, putting on and taking off PPE takes longer. Some of your travel may take longer. If you join the conference call, that should be part of your productive time. And we are taking that into consideration when we look at productivity on average.
Administrative
When will the recordings of the Marki’s Call from last week be posted?
This was updated already since the time that question was received. You can access the recordings on the COVID site here