Safework Health provides worksites with 24/7 drug and alcohol testing, lab testing, and employee health monitoring services. Their work reduces the amount of workplace accidents by reducing incidents where drugs and alcohol could have been a factor.

Safework Health approached Newpath with a brief to digitise their manual reporting processes for drug & alcohol site test results. Traditionally, Safework’s consultants had compiled reports from their custom-built Laboratory Information System on a monthly basis. This process would be repeated for each client on a monthly basis consuming days of effort each month. The team at Safework came up with the idea of a digital dashboard for clients to securely access their site test data. 

The desired outcome would include user-friendly charts and tables that illustrate drug & alcohol compliance per site and per drug type. The data should be directly sourced from the Laboratory Information System via data import routines, significantly reducing manual efforts

Newpath’s digital innovation and design teams collaborated with Safework Health, leveraging a Design Thinking framework to extract the brightest ideas from the working group. Together, we identified a core objective to deliver an industry-leading digital platform that provided crucial insights for employee safety. 

Safework set the challenge of reaching a particular set of outcomes, including: automated processing of data from their Laboratory Information System (LIS); easy-to-navigate and interactive data visualisation tools for users; effective filters for big data sets; data benchmarks; automated client alerts based on data thresholds; and comprehensive user access and permissions management.

Collaborative design workshops, prototypes, development showcases, iterative UAT and sprint-based delivery assured a smooth delivery of the platform.

As part of the discovery phase, the team had to understand audience drivers, objectives and day-to-day needs. Who will use the platform? How will the data be shared with stakeholders? What data is most useful for the audiences? What actions could be taken from data insights? How could this system save people’s lives, improve company safety and compliance records, and reduce incidents? How can we leverage automation to streamline processes, communications, and user access?

Once these top level questions were answered, our data team reviewed Safework’s existing Excel-based client reports and processes. A crucial part of the puzzle was understanding Safework’s lab test data architecture to understand the opportunities for visualising data into meaningful reports that may help an organisation effectively monitor employee drag & alcohol consumption in high risk or compliance-driven environments.

With the discovery phase completed, the design team organised several interactive workshops for ideation. Based on the discussions in those workshops, the design team created interactive prototypes, presenting these to the client stakeholders, listening to stakeholder feedback, and iterating on the designs until parties were satisfied with the outcome. Newpath established a project roadmap outlining roles and responsibilities, a comprehensive execution plan, and key deadlines. The project followed a semi-agile approach, working in sprints across design, development, and UAT.

The frontend of the application was developed using the Angular Framework, providing a responsive and swift single-page application experience. On the backend, the system was powered by Node.js, utilising Express.js as a library to create the server and route controller for seamless communication.

Additional technical components included automated emails through SendGrid, Sequelize ORM for migrating models, AWS S3 Bucket for secure file storage, and PostgreSQL as the robust and scalable database solution. The programming language employed was Typescript, a subset of Java, used to define data and seamlessly integrate with the Angular Framework.

These technological choices collectively contributed to the application’s speed, reliability, and user-centric design, ensuring a seamless experience for both administrators and end-users.

While the solution was being developed, Newpath’s digital marketing team also assisted with the go-to-market and digital product strategy to help the Safework Health team launch the product to their client base. Our team offered product branding, a landing page, value statements and strategic advice.

Reporta is an industry-leading platform providing data-driven insights to help organisations reduce safety incidents. The platform effectively illustrates drug and alcohol incidents as both trends and explicit data sets per client site. Ultimately, safety managers right through to company boards can monitor drug and alcohol intake of staff across their organisations via a comprehensive set of reports and automated alerts. 

The web client portal is not only attractive with its interactive charts, but also highly secure offering 2FA authentication and meets WCAG AA accessibility standards.

The custom-built data processing engine effectively standardises, simplifies and anonymises complex laboratory data significantly reducing manual reporting efforts. Safework Health Management said “Now Safework Health clients have a secure, self-serve web portal to access and share crucial health data while also having the ability to set benchmarks, goals and automated email alerts to invoke organisational action aiming to make Australia’s workplaces safer.”
Newpath CEO, Nathan Sinnott, said, “The successful collaboration between our teams with a focus on a common goal has delivering nothing short of a powerful and industry leading outcome for Safework Health and their clients. This is a transformative project that will deliver outstanding performance, service and safety solutions for many years to come.”