The development of an innovative platform to improve SMEs' ability to provide occupational health services to their workforce and performance in the workplace

COVID-19疫情突显了员工在工作中身心健康的重要性，并通过增加混合工作方式彻底改变了工作性质。许多大型雇主试图通过为员工制定健康计划来解决这一问题。然而，这些措施主要侧重于心理健康，而不是更广泛的职业健康;并且没有跟上混合工作环境中员工的需求。大多数中小企业和自营职业者没有资源承诺提供定制的职业健康服务，有公共和私营提供者向公司提供职业健康服务，但由于缺乏时间和潜在中小企业客户缺乏需求，它们提供创新的能力受到限制，尽管这部分是由于缺乏对选择的认识。近年来，职业健康评估有了一些创新，例如，在线评估工具和远程应用程序的开发;但这些更旨在为职业健康提供者的服务创造新的业务。中小企业对职业健康服务缺乏认同是创新的障碍，也是我们在此项目中渴望解决的问题。为了应对这一挑战，我们建议开发我们现有的健康平台（软件即服务），为客户公司或个人提供完整的职业健康诊断工具。初始评估建立独特的员工档案并创建基线阅读。我们计划将此输入与来自用户个人设备的数据（例如，智能手表）和安装在工作场所的廉价环境传感器，以全面了解员工的职业健康需求。如果需要干预，该平台将从市场上的众多供应商中确定合适的服务提供商。这将使中小企业只需支付所需的职业健康服务，使雇员提供的服务比一揽子提供的服务更实惠。事实上，我们的工具将作为一个完整的职业健康解决方案的评估和中介工具，消除现有服务提供的障碍，并解决广泛认可的市场失灵。我们将通过向中小企业和自雇客户收取每月许可费，以及在向客户中介职业健康服务时收取小额转介费，从服务中受益。我们相信这是一种独特的方法，非常适合市场。

The COVID-19 pandemic brought into sharp relief the importance of employees' health and wellbeing at work, both physical and mental; and radically transformed the nature of work through increased hybrid working. Many larger employers have attempted to address this through the development of wellness programmes for their staff. These have largely focused, however, on mental wellbeing, rather than broader occupational health; and have not kept pace with the needs of employees in a hybrid working environment. Most SMEs and the self-employed do not have the resources to commit to bespoke occupational health provision.There are both public and private providers that offer occupational health services to companies, but their capacity to deliver innovation is limited by a lack of time and a perceived lack of demand from potential SME customers, although this is partly driven by lack of awareness of options. There has been some innovation in occupational health assessment in recent years, _e.g._, the development of online assessment tools and remote apps; but these are more aimed at creating new business for occupational health providers' services generally. The lack of SME buy-in to occupational health services is recognised as a barrier to innovation and one we are keen to address in this project.To address the challenge, we propose to develop our existing wellbeing platform (software-as-a-service) to provide a complete occupational health diagnostic tool for client companies or individuals. An initial assessment builds the unique employee profile and creates a baseline reading. We plan to couple this input with data from users' personal devices (_e.g._, smart-watches) and cheap environmental sensors installed at workplaces to build up a thorough picture of employees' occupational health needs. Where an intervention is needed, the platform will then identify a suitable service provider from the myriad suppliers on the market. This will allow SMEs to pay only for the occupational health services they need, making an employee offering much more affordable than blanket provision. Our tool will, in effect, act as an assessment and brokerage tool for a complete occupational health solution, removing a barrier to greater uptake of existing service provision and addressing a widely-recognised market failure.We will benefit from the service through charging a monthly licence fee to SMEs and self-employed customers, and also a small referral fee when brokering an occupational health service to a client. We believe this is a unique approach ideally tailored to the market.