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

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.