WorkOK

The Need

Nowadays, in many work centers, employees from different companies work together towards common goals. However, COVID-19 forces us to rethink shared spaces.

Let’s imagine an industrial plant that supplies some critical service, i.e. energy. In those kinds of facilities, there are workers from several suppliers and third parties. In this work environment, it is crucial for the companies involved to ensure the health and safety of their employees.

Currently, companies have protocols to ensure the health status of third party employees accessing their facilities. But, the COVID-19 crisis makes it necessary to increase these access protocol requirements. Those time-consuming processes are to be, from now on, more agile, highly reliable from a health perspective, and trustworthy in a way that ensures employees' privacy.

This is the New Normal for ensuring the development of a safe, healthy, and productive work in any facility:

Trustworthy certification of employee’s health status.
Faster process to adapt to the pace that a pandemic may require.
Scalable to apply to all the workers, and with the maximum flexibility to get it done every few days.
Private, so to keep the privacy of worker’s personal information.

The Problem

In the current COVID-19 situation, 3rd parties access management systems lack the requirements to guarantee the development of safe, healthy, and productive work in facilities.

The 3rd party access to facilities is a rather manual and bureaucratic process that can’t cope with the New Normal. These systems are designed for checking the certification of 3rd party employees once every year, whereas, in the current situation, a medical certificate might lose validity in less than 14 days (the incubation period of COVID-19).

These systems have no integral data traceability from employees to the facility and are not dynamically linked to health authorities either. In the New Normal, facilities shall be warned if any of their 3rd party employees test positive in COVID-19, even days after completion of their activities.

Furthermore, the current management systems are not bidirectional nor connect 3rd parties between them. As an example, a worker that is developing an activity at a customer's location has no chance of being informed on the risks of exposure to COVID-19 or other health threats.

Since a generalized pandemic situation might oblige the companies to perform extensive verification of workers' health, a system with the ability to be scalable is mandatory from now on.

In the current medical certification process, the 3rd party provider sends the medical information to the facilities. The 3rd party could see how the contracts signed with the customer could be compromised in the event of not being able to comply with the service requirements in terms of human resources. Thus, this could cause a conflict of interest and a lack of confidence.

The Solution

WorkOK is a decentralized application (DApp), based on a permissioned blockchain, designed for checking and preventing COVID-19 transmission from or to workers providing services at 3rd party facilities while ensuring workers' privacy.

Thanks to the use of decentralized and permissioned blockchain technology, WorkOK is designed to fulfill the requirements of the New Normal and ensure the development of safe, healthy, and productive work in facilities.

WorkOK deploys a trusted network where medical centers validate the health state of the workers before and after accessing a facility.

Once the medical center has certified the state of the worker, this status is uploaded in the form of a hash-conformity status tuple to a distributed ledger. That information is accessible by the customer company in the form of a hashed certification. However, only the health centers know all the details about the health status of the worker. Thus, the personal data of workers are kept privately and safely within the blockchain.

This process provides trustworthy information to participant stakeholders because that information is directly gathered from the blockchain, once the medical validator has approved it. Moreover, there is no intervention of the worker-employer in this process.

In this way, WorkOK automates the certification process and eliminates the manual tasks, so it is flexible and agile to cope with the New Normal requirements of emitting COVID-19 medical certificates with the validity of days.

WorkOK dynamically links the facilities with the workers and health centers, so the facilities can be warned if any of their 3rd party employees test positive in COVID-19 days after completion of their activities.

Additionally, WorkOK allows tracing the data anonymously from the worker to the facility and vice versa, so the worker can be warned in the event of an accidental exposure to any threat such as COVID-19, during or after completion of the activities.

Check our pitch video

Check our pitch deck

About Us

We are The Blockchain Firm, your Industry 4.0 Consulting Partner.

In The Blockchain Firm we take care of your Blockchain project, from start to finish. We can embrace most singular and complex projects, customized to your needs. With a few successful POCs and test-bed projects in Europe, and one presented patent, we are currently working on our blockchain technology white-paper.

Although software constitutes the firm's core, business is our passion. We can identify and develop new use-cases where others are just trying or failing. And, as we have the right in-house expertise, we can offer you, and your company, fully turn-key solutions adjusted to your requirements.

Our work during the weekend

We heard about EUvsVIRUS hackathon on Friday 24th. All the members of The Blockchain Firm quickly agreed on registering and joining the European community looking for solutions for the COVID-19 crisis.

During the first hours of the hackathon, we chose the sector which best suited our capabilities and drafted the business case. On Saturday, we wrote down the main points of WorkOK and prepared the mockups. Finally, on the last day of the event, we completed both the textual and video pitch.

Next steps

WorkOK is designed to fulfill the requirements of the New Normal situation where employees must work on site and ensure their safety and health.

To date, WorkOK is in the early stages of the business innovation cycle. The next step is getting feedback from stakeholders, hopefully leading this to an MVP development stage.

In The Blockchain Firm, we have the capabilities to carry out the project from beginning to end. Our current necessity is raising an initial funding to draft a business plan and define the marketable innovation solution.

WorkOK is designed to become the standard in the New Normal industry.