Mitigate COVID-19: Exclusive Interview with Rapid Testing Service ClearMe™

At a time when reducing the spread of COVID-19 is crucial, we sat down with Kurt Menzies, Founder of ClearMe™, an on-demand COVID-19 diagnostic testing platform offering rapid testing solutions to help businesses, like EcoOnline North America customer Avenge Energy Services, mitigate COVID-19 outbreaks.

Kurt gave us an in-depth look at what happens behind the scenes to give people their results quickly and how they worked with Avenge Energy Services and EcoOnline North America to make a positive impact on the health and safety of their workforce.

Dina: Describe ClearMe™ and what you do for high-risk industries. 

Kurt: “ClearMe™ is a private program with Health Canada and FDA approved chemistry and laboratories, catered to giving businesses an opportunity to get back on their feet with what has been going on with COVID-19 in the workplace. Our goal is to find some stability and a baseline for organizations to mitigate and navigate through the global pandemic, by offering a rapid testing solution to help quickly identify those who may have COVID-19.

Every day there is news and articles presenting new information and different approaches. It really is a rollercoaster for enterprises and organizations to navigate. So, we wanted to create a baseline from a data perspective so organizations can have relevant data that is factual to them. We can look at it from an outside perspective to eliminate a little of the surprise that’s been happening.”

Dina: How did your relationship begin with our EcoOnline North America customer, Avenge Energy?

Kurt: “Working with Avenge started out as an acute situation where they had a couple of individuals showing symptoms. They needed real-time testing to get results quickly. When Andrew Bursey, the Director of Transportation and HSE, first made contact with me earlier this year, the team thought this was an opportunity to work with a system solely focused on the missing component for testing.

Avenge Energy has done a fantastic job understanding what they need to do internally before they hand off information to us. They did the majority of the heavy lifting with the EcoOnline North America software. We came into the picture when they were already ahead of their industry peers and it was a beautiful plug and play because we had the other side of the equation nailed down, which was offering a rapid testing solution.”

Dina: Can you speak to the process with Avenge Energy and what the workflow looks like? 

Kurt:“Avenge Energy has a safety program in place, and they’ve been nailing it. They have a monitoring program with symptoms recorded with EcoOnline North America ’s Daily COVID-19 Assessment Form. This gets analyzed and presented to HR, and if the end user selects an “unpreferred answer” it gets flagged to HR. HR will then contact us and flag the issue. This happens in real time.

Most times we get them in the same day, and we dispatch one of our collection technicians to go in and collect the sample. We either go to the individual’s residence, we can have them meet us in a defined location for sample collection, or we can meet them on-site and pick up the sample that way. The patient’s intake is all digital. It’s quick and simple. From an employee standpoint, the interaction with us should be under 5 minutes.

The sample then goes out to one of our certified labs, which processes it and we have results within 24-48 hours. This timeline is actually decreasing with Canadian-made technology with same day results in as little as an hour in certain circumstances. Then the results go back to the appropriate parties so they can quickly manage. This is available on a global scale.”

Dina: What is your impression of this process with an EHS software in place at Avenge?

Kurt: “It’s more seamless and real time. It allows organizations to stay focused on their operations because it’s critical for them to do that right now. Now is the time to be doing the best you can within the organization.

This is huge and it’s also something companies are familiar with. For us to go and recreate our own dashboards and our own forms, it takes time to retrain them and teach them how to interact with yet another piece of software. This is quite detrimental to all parties involved.

EcoOnline North America provides a streamlined approach and is something they’re already familiar with. I don’t have to spend any time teaching Avenge Energy’s HR department how to use EcoOnline North America .”

Dina: How can EcoOnline North America help your customers achieve safety success in the coming days, weeks, months?

Kurt: “Certainly for our customers, if they don’t already have EcoOnline North America , bringing it in is no doubt going to have an impact on that part of the business that you guys do so well, like providing usable data. Introducing them to EcoOnline North America will help them at a critical time where they need to save money and streamline processes, with better data to manage this. If there are tools to do this, like EcoOnline North America , this is a win-win all around.”

Dina: What do you want to say to North America during this time?

Kurt: “If we can work together to have a set of information allowing us to operate on a day to day basis, I think this is key to everyone’s success in managing forward through COVID-19.

This is something we have to do collectively through strategic alliances and partnerships. There is too much going on for companies to take this on, on their own. This is what I see as a clear path forward.

The ones who do it will have the best chance of success because they won’t be changing the script and tone every single day and confusing employees and policies. If we can come up with a joint effort to streamline that and work together through industry partnerships and learnings from things Avenge Energy has done and passing it on to our peers, this is how we manage forward through this. We can start making an impact right now in our organizations by doing this.”

The story doesn’t stop there. Check out our webinar, Controlling COVID-19: Reduce Outbreaks and Proactively Manage Employee Safety for more information with Kurt Menzies and Andrew Bursey, Director of HSE and Transportation at Avenge Energy.

At EcoOnline North America , it is our mission to help you keep your people safe. Control COVID-19 and simplify safety with us. Our COVID-19 Tracking Package, inspired by our customer Avenge Energy, gives you access to:
2 COVID-19 Tracking Forms

• COVID-19: Employee Self-Assessment
• COVID-19 End of Day and Start of Day Prevention: Daily Acknowledgement

COVID-19 Management Dashboard

• Reporting dashboard with real-time metrics on exposure risks, by site/location, and available for daily subscription

If you are an EcoOnline North America customer, contact your designated Customer Success Coach today to implement this package.

If you are not an EcoOnline North America customer,  get in touch with one of our safety experts today.