In the summer of 2020, Altres designed its own health-screening questionnaire software for its employees to confidently report to work amid the still relatively new coronavirus pandemic.
Since then, Hawaii’s largest staffing and administration company expanded its web-based Wellness Tracker service to include its human resources clients, and eventually, any company or group that wanted to use the daily survey check-in — free of charge.
Most recently, amid policy changes like Oahu’s Safe Access mandate for restaurants, gyms, and other gathering spaces, a feature was added on Wellness Tracker for users to upload a picture of a Covid-19 vaccination card, or a negative Covid test.
“Right now Wellness Tracker seems to be the thing that the entire community … needs to help people return to work, [and] open up for business,” Joshua Laguana, Altres senior sales engineer, told Pacific Business News this week.
Besides businesses, it can be used by volunteer groups, sports leagues, or any other band of associated people to send out, via text message, daily health questionnaires of the registrant’s choosing.
People who are not in a specific Wellness Tracker group but who must enter a designated space, like a delivery person or a restaurant guest, can scan a QR code on their phone and fill out the same questions. If, in a given day, they visit two or more places that use Wellness Tracker, information is still only required once.
In the event for a need to contact trace, employers or administrators can go back through Wellness Tracker’s data to see which people were grouped together on a specific day.
There are nearly 600 groups to have registered on the platform as of this week, Laguana said. That encompasses some 40,000 users, including some on the Mainland.
The decision to make Wellness Tracker free to use for everybody came from Altres President and CEO Barron Guss.
“He understands that in order for our company to thrive, we need our community, our economy to thrive,” Laguana said.
“In house, we needed a way to make sure our employees felt safe to come back to work. Then we provided that to our clients through our technology, and we were seeing that people were utilizing it. Then it came into a larger conversation that Barron really wanted the entire community to return to work, not just our clients.”
Laguana declined to say how much it cost to develop the platform, which originated from Altres’ HR Symphony technology for human resources clients that was originally released in 2009. Altres has a web development team of four, plus three support staff, he said.
Above all else, the platform is meant to be simple. This week, it saw an increase of more than 30 new user groups.
“It’s very nice to see people are gravitating to it for its ease of use,” Laguana said.
Altres, a member of the state’s AlohaSafe Coalition, can update Wellness Tracker if and when new local or federal requirements are introduced, he said.
