Matt Laws is President and CEO of Safe Expo, which offers pre-event health planning support, onsite implementation and post-event health monitoring for live meetings and events. Born in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company was founded by event and medical professionals to help educate producers and planners and prepare them to deal with the new health safety concerns that events are facing.
The rollout of more and more vaccines will help large venues reopen and allow our industry to bring back in-person events in the coming months. It will be critical for event organizers and venues to work together to deliver events where attendees feel safe participating. Technology plays a key role in this effort and can streamline health safety measures for event organizers.
Here are four ways technology takes event health safety plans beyond sanitizing stations and facial coverings:
Mobile, web-based technology allows event organizers to easily meet government mandates requiring them to obtain registrant health information. The technology solution can be automated, customized and digitally distributed to registrants on a daily basis. Once registrants complete the health form, event organizers receive the information in daily attendance reports.
There are also additional options coming available as technology firms develop new tools to help large events return. For example, event organizers can use new technology solutions to add features that track vaccinations or negative COVID-19 tests conducted within a certain time frame before they arrive onsite to the event. They can also conduct additional health surveys entirely online.
Conducting temperature checks has quickly become routine to enter many facilities, but what happens after a participant gets the all-clear to enter? With technology, each participant’s pass/fail result is captured and maintained securely. Event organizers can receive daily reports to ensure their health objectives are being met.
It has become increasingly common for organizers to offer onsite COVID-19 testing options at their events. Testing can take many forms and event organizers can customize their approach based on their needs by implementing hybrid options to allow greater flexibility for satisfying the testing requirement. Some event organizers might opt to allow registrants to bring their own negative test report while allowing others to choose the onsite testing option which can include rapid testing. Other event organizers may choose only to use testing as a secondary mitigation factor when a participant shows symptoms onsite or does not pass the daily health attestation or temperature screening procedures.
Not many things are harder than locating hundreds of individuals after they’ve left an event and scattered across the country. Should someone test positive after an event, the data that event organizers obtained and securely stored digitally can help local health departments in their contact tracing efforts. By incorporating technology and multiple mitigation factors into the overall event health and safety plan, the events industry can help limit exposure and reduce major outbreaks.
By bringing back in-person events as safely as possible, our industry can be a big part of the solution for a safe economic recovery. Technology makes this job so much easier and more effective while also prioritizing participants’ privacy. More technology solutions are being developed every day which will only improve our ability to create the safest environments possible for all of our participants.
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