How we built a system based on color, contrast, and symbols to help promote workplace accessibility and useability for our workers — and our clients

Whether you’re hiring clinicians or admin workers, it can be difficult finding the right folks for the job at the moment — and even more difficult to keep them. It’s a trend that’s affecting virtually every corner of the United States and yet another excellent reason to make sure you’re doing your best to offer Workplace Accessibility and useability for everyone who works with you.

It’s obvious that keeping the people essential to your continued success is mission-critical. Yet it’s rare for employers to take the right steps to ensure those staff are happy and productive in their roles. Emphasizing workplace Accessibility and useability can go far towards correcting this problem.

As with so much else we do, MatrixCare strives to be a leader when it comes to workplace accessibility. That’s one of the reasons we’ve designed a user interface (UI) to meet the needs and preferences of different types of people who communicate in a variety of ways.

In our scheduling interface, for instance, we’ve implemented visual indicators using color, contrast, and iconography to let schedulers more readily distinguish between different types of care. That means being able to tell at a glance the difference between, say, a skilled nursing visit and a physical therapy visit.

Though they’re bound to be helpful anywhere they’re used, we’ve found these improvements in workplace accessibility are particularly important for scheduling staff. Let’s face it, schedulers have a tough job. So, we wanted to support them with key innovations to help them excel at their jobs. For example:

1. The use of icons and symbols allows schedulers to see the difference between different types of visits with a quick glance. This includes the way items are grouped, as well as larger icons and font sizes to ensure that those with visual challenges can understand more easily what they’re seeing on screen — and make the right decisions.
2. The use of colors represents certain disciplines and other important indicators. We worked hard to find a color palette that was complementary to many types of visual impairment. We also used focus groups to help review our decisions and make sure we were making the right choices.
3. The use of contrast, in addition to the use of colors, is another way to differentiate items. For those with visual impairments, ensuring workplace accessibility means you should avoid relying solely on a color-based system, particularly colors with similar shades.
4. Additional tools like speech-to-text and text-to-speech, which can be helpful to those who struggle with dyslexia or other learning or reading impairments.

Promoting staff retention with workplace accessibility

Numbers show that it can cost as much as 175 percent of a regular salary to recruit and train a replacement. But even if staff retention weren’t such a timely challenge, promoting workplace accessibility and useability is always a good idea. It can boost morale, and is a good way to help make sure your operational goals are being met. It could even help you avoid potential lawsuits.

The team at MatrixCare is made up of industry professionals who have worked through these sorts of issue in the past. We’ve seen what happens when valuable workers eventually seek out new careers because it’s too difficult for them to do their present jobs satisfactorily.

“The company is not going to change for me,” they think. “I’m just one person who can’t see, so I’ll just quit.”

And nobody can afford that right now — or ever, really.

A major advantage of increased workplace accessibility and useability is that it can help prevent turnover and lets workers function at the top of their abilities, instead of forcing them to seek new horizons. Partner with MatrixCare and you’ll have access to new, carefully created innovations to accomplish just this goal, accommodating a wide range of people with varying levels of ability — and helping you keep the staff members you can’t afford to lose.

Request a demo to see how MatrixCare EHR solutions can help you enhance your own workplace accessibility and useability.

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