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ichekservices · 1 year ago

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Balancing Pre-Employment Drug Testing and Background Checks with iChek Services

Introduction

In the world of modern business, where companies strive to maintain a productive and safe working environment, the processes of pre-employment drug testing and background checks have emerged as crucial components of the hiring process. At iChek Services, your trusted partner in employee screening, individual screening, and corporate screening solutions, we understand the delicate balance required to ensure both a drug-free workplace and fair employment opportunities. Our commitment to providing comprehensive services has led us to explore the art of harmonizing pre-employment drug testing and background checks. In this article, we delve into the importance of this balance and how it contributes to the success of businesses and the well-being of employees.

The Purpose of Pre-Employment Drug Testing: At iChek Services, we recognize that pre-employment drug testing is vital to ensuring candidates entering the workforce are free from substances that could impair their ability to perform their jobs safely and effectively. This practice is particularly critical in safety-sensitive industries.

The Role of Background Checks: Our suite of services includes comprehensive background checks, encompassing criminal records, education verification, employment history, and more. These checks, provided by iChek Services, contribute to creating a secure work environment and reducing risks associated with negligent hiring.

Striking the Balance: Achieving the right balance between pre-employment drug testing and background checks is central to our approach at iChek Services. We understand that overemphasizing either aspect could lead to missed opportunities or an overbearing hiring process. By integrating both, we ensure companies can mitigate risks while giving qualified candidates a fair chance at employment.

Customized Screening Solutions: We pride ourselves on offering personalized screening solutions tailored to your industry and role requirements. With iChek Services, your candidates are evaluated fairly and appropriately, considering the unique demands of each position.

Legal and Ethical Considerations: Our commitment to legality and ethics is unwavering. iChek Services ensures adherence to regulations such as the Drug-Free Workplace Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), guaranteeing a lawful and ethical screening process that respects candidates' rights and privacy.

Communication and Transparency: At iChek Services, transparent communication with candidates is a cornerstone of our approach. We believe that open dialogue about the purpose and scope of drug testing and background checks fosters trust between your company and potential employees.

Conclusion

Balancing pre-employment drug testing and background checks is an art that requires expertise and understanding. At iChek Services, our comprehensive screening solutions exemplify this equilibrium, reflecting our commitment to creating safer workplaces and offering equal opportunities. By embracing the synergy between drug testing and background checks, businesses partnering with iChek Services can build a workforce that thrives in a secure and supportive environment while safeguarding their interests. Choose iChek Services for a holistic approach to screening that respects both your company's goals and candidates' rights.

#ichek services #background check services #pre employment screening #drug testing

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accurate02 · 4 months ago

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#pre employment drug testing

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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months ago

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Cigna’s nopeinator

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THURSDAY (May 2) in WINNIPEG, then Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Cigna – like all private health insurers – has two contradictory imperatives:

To keep its customers healthy; and

To make as much money for its shareholders as is possible.

Now, there's a hypothetical way to resolve these contradictions, a story much beloved by advocates of America's wasteful, cruel, inefficient private health industry: "If health is a "market," then a health insurer that fails to keep its customers healthy will lose those customers and thus make less for its shareholders." In this thought-experiment, Cigna will "find an equilibrium" between spending money to keep its customers healthy, thus retaining their business, and also "seeking efficiencies" to create a standard of care that's cost-effective.

But health care isn't a market. Most of us get our health-care through our employers, who offer small handful of options that nevertheless manage to be so complex in their particulars that they're impossible to directly compare, and somehow all end up not covering the things we need them for. Oh, and you can only change insurers once or twice per year, and doing so incurs savage switching costs, like losing access to your family doctor and specialists providers.

Cigna – like other health insurers – is "too big to care." It doesn't have to worry about losing your business, so it grows progressively less interested in even pretending to keep you healthy.

The most important way for an insurer to protect its profits at the expense of your health is to deny care that your doctor believes you need. Cigna has transformed itself into a care-denying assembly line.

Dr Debby Day is a Cigna whistleblower. Dr Day was a Cigna medical director, charged with reviewing denied cases, a job she held for 20 years. In 2022, she was forced out by Cigna. Writing for Propublica and The Capitol Forum, Patrick Rucker and David Armstrong tell her story, revealing the true "equilibrium" that Cigna has found:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-medical-director-doctor-patient-preapproval-denials-insurance

Dr Day took her job seriously. Early in her career, she discovered a pattern of claims from doctors for an expensive therapy called intravenous immunoglobulin in cases where this made no medical sense. Dr Day reviewed the scientific literature on IVIG and developed a Cigna-wide policy for its use that saved the company millions of dollars.

This is how it's supposed to work: insurers (whether private or public) should permit all the medically necessary interventions and deny interventions that aren't supported by evidence, and they should determine the difference through internal reviewers who are treated as independent experts.

But as the competitive landscape for US healthcare dwindled – and as Cigna bought out more parts of its supply chain and merged with more of its major rivals – the company became uniquely focused on denying claims, irrespective of their medical merit.

In Dr Day's story, the turning point came when Cinga outsourced pre-approvals to registered nurses in the Philippines. Legally, a nurse can approve a claim, but only an MD can deny a claim. So Dr Day and her colleagues would have to sign off when a nurse deemed a procedure, therapy or drug to be medically unnecessary.

This is a complex determination to make, even under ideal circumstances, but Cigna's Filipino outsource partners were far from ideal. Dr Day found that nurses were "sloppy" – they'd confuse a mother with her newborn baby and deny care on that grounds, or confuse an injured hip with an injured neck and deny permission for an ultrasound. Dr Day reviewed a claim for a test that was denied because STI tests weren't "medically necessary" – but the patient's doctor had applied for a test to diagnose a toenail fungus, not an STI.

Even if the nurses' evaluations had been careful, Dr Day wanted to conduct her own, thorough investigation before overriding another doctor's judgment about the care that doctor's patient warranted. When a nurse recommended denying care "for a cancer patient or a sick baby," Dr Day would research medical guidelines, read studies and review the patient's record before signing off on the recommendation.

This was how the claims denial process is said to work, but it's not how it was supposed to work. Dr Day was markedly slower than her peers, who would "click and close" claims by pasting the nurses' own rationale for denying the claim into the relevant form, acting as a rubber-stamp rather than a skilled reviewer.

Dr Day knew she was slower than her peers. Cigna made sure of that, producing a "productivity dashboard" that scored doctors based on "handle time," which Cigna describes as the average time its doctors spend on different kinds of claims. But Dr Day and other Cigna sources say that this was a maximum, not an average – a way of disciplining doctors.

These were not long times. If a doctor asked Cigna not to discharge their patient from hospital care and a nurse denied that claim, the doctor reviewing that claim was supposed to spend not more than 4.5 minutes on their review. Other timelines were even more aggressive: many denials of prescription drugs were meant to be resolved in fewer than two minutes.

Cigna told Propublica and The Capitol Forum that its productivity scores weren't based on a simple calculation about whether its MD reviewers were hitting these brutal processing time targets, describing the scores as a proprietary mix of factors that reflected a nuanced view of care. But when Propublica and The Capitol Forum created a crude algorithm to generate scores by comparing a doctor's performance relative to the company's targets, they found the results fit very neatly into the actual scores that Cigna assigned to its docs:

The newsrooms’ formula accurately reproduced the scores of 87% of the Cigna doctors listed; the scores of all but one of the rest fell within 1 to 2 percentage points of the number generated by this formula. When asked about this formula, Cigna said it may be inaccurate but didn’t elaborate.

As Dr Day slipped lower on the productivity chart, her bosses pressured her bring her score up (Day recorded her phone calls and saved her emails, and the reporters verified them). Among other things, Dr Day's boss made it clear that her annual bonus and stock options were contingent on her making quota.

Cigna denies all of this. They smeared Dr Day as a "disgruntled former employee" (as though that has any bearing on the truthfulness of her account), and declined to explain the discrepancies between Dr Day's accusations and Cigna's bland denials.

This isn't new for Cigna. Last year, Propublica and Capitol Forum revealed the existence of an algorithmic claims denial system that allowed its doctors to bulk-deny claims in as little as 1.2 seconds:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims

Cigna insisted that this was a mischaracterization, saying the system existed to speed up the approval of claims, despite the first-hand accounts of Cigna's own doctors and the doctors whose care recommendations were blocked by the system. One Cigna doctor used this system to "review" and deny 60,000 claims in one month.

Beyond serving as an indictment of the US for-profit health industry, and of Cigna's business practices, this is also a cautionary tale about the idea that critical AI applications can be resolved with "humans in the loop."

AI pitchmen claim that even unreliable AI can be fixed by adding a "human in the loop" that reviews the AI's judgments:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

In this world, the AI is an assistant to the human. For example, a radiologist might have an AI double-check their assessments of chest X-rays, and revisit those X-rays where the AI's assessment didn't match their own. This robot-assisted-human configuration is called a "centaur."

In reality, "human in the loop" is almost always a reverse-centaur. If the hospital buys an AI, fires half its radiologists and orders the remainder to review the AI's superhuman assessments of chest X-rays, that's not an AI assisted radiologist, that's a radiologist-assisted AI. Accuracy goes down, but so do costs. That's the bet that AI investors are making.

Many AI applications turn out not to even be "AI" – they're just low-waged workers in an overseas call-center pretending to be an algorithm (some Indian techies joke that AI stands for "absent Indians"). That was the case with Amazon's Grab and Go stores where, supposedly, AI-enabled cameras counted up all the things you put in your shopping basket and automatically billed you for them. In reality, the cameras were connected to Indian call-centers where low-waged workers made those assessments:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

This Potemkin AI represents an intermediate step between outsourcing and AI. Over the past three decades, the growth of cheap telecommunications and logistics systems let corporations outsource customer service to low-waged offshore workers. The corporations used the excuse that these subcontractors were far from the firm and its customers to deny them any agency, giving them rigid scripts and procedures to follow.

This was a very usefully dysfunctional system. As a customer with a complaint, you would call the customer service line, wait for a long time on hold, spend an interminable time working through a proscribed claims-handling process with a rep who was prohibited from diverging from that process. That process nearly always ended with you being told that nothing could be done.

At that point, a large number of customers would have given up on getting a refund, exchange or credit. The money paid out to the few customers who were stubborn or angry enough to karen their way to a supervisor and get something out of the company amounted to pennies, relative to the sums the company reaped by ripping off the rest.

The Amazon Grab and Go workers were humans in robot suits, but these customer service reps were robots in human suits. The software told them what to say, and they said it, and all they were allowed to say was what appeared on their screens. They were reverse centaurs, serving as the human faces of the intransigent robots programmed by monopolists that were too big to care.

AI is the final stage of this progression: robots without the human suits. The AI turns its "human in the loop" into a "moral crumple zone," which Madeleine Clare Elish describes as "a component that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

The Filipino nurses in the Cigna system are an avoidable expense. As Cigna's own dabbling in algorithmic claim-denial shows, they can be jettisoned in favor of a system that uses productivity dashboards and other bossware to push doctors to robosign hundreds or thousands of denials per day, on the pretense that these denials were "reviewed" by a licensed physician.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

#pluralistic #cigna #computer says no #bossware #moral crumple zones #medicare for all #m4a #whistleblowers #dr debby day #Madeleine Clare Elish #automation #ai #outsourcing #human in the loop #humans in the loop

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oliviawebsite · 11 months ago

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i agree w you about pre employment drug testing but job interviews? the thing where they meet you? and see what your like and if you’ve got the skills required? i dont get why theyre bad

ive elaborated multiple times on this. they are not skill checks by any means. they are only in place to filter "undesirables" from employment positions. they are ALWAYS subject to cultural biases. this is why so many people struggle to find work. now they can see youre a tranny before drafting up any paperwork and they can reject you with enough plausible deniability to claim it wasnt discrimination. this is the purpose of interviews. they ask generic blanket questions that test how Normal the subject is. its a way of doing things with a ton of negative side effects and whether it was intentional or not (its very much intentional btw) we need to rethink how we do job placement in the western capitalist world. people shouldnt have to grovel and socially compete with each other for an opportunity to barely cover their living expenses. job interviews need to be abolished. as i elaborared to a previous anon, there can be placement programs, employers can be required to offer paid training trial periods to job seekers. we dont have to do it the way we do it now.

#i have a lot to say on this #the purpose of a system is what it does #and what this system does is force the existence of an exploitable and desperate underclass

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ceru-draws · 1 month ago

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I feel unmoored. Untethered. Sick with a mystery illness causing me to cough up my lungs and currently out of a job more abruptly and dramatically that I thought I was going to be. Maybe, hopefully, hopefully, starting a new career soon that will change my life for the better in so many ways, given that I did not fuck everything up by being on flu medicine during my pre-employment drug test. I feel floaty. Mote-like. Fuzzy and shapeless. The end of a year is hurdling towards me and all I can do is drift here until my body finds me again.

#personal #this simply has to be the strangest way for me to undergo a huge life change and its knocking out whatever is left of the air in my lungs #will probably delete this soon idk i just want to use my tumblr however i wish to these days

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postcrashcurly · 8 days ago

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Headcanons: Anya's Capabilities and Medical Knowledge in Regards to her Position at Pony Express

Someone expressed some interest in my headcanons for Anya and, of course, I made a long ass post about it because I'm incapable of shutting up.

For Anya to board the Tulpar on a long haul without being a significant liability risk, she must have gone through some type of company training/certification program that would qualify her for employment.

Negligent hiring: a civil cause of action in which an employer is found liable because they hired someone they knew, or should have known, was likely to harm others in the position for which they were hired. An employer who hires or retains an incompetent or dangerous employee can be held liable for that employee’s wrongful acts, if performed in the course and scope of employment.

In order to keep this post accurate, a lot of my research hedges on maritime medicine- which is as close to canon as real-life gets.

Pre-employment Academics:

1. Associates Degree in Nursing: two year training to become a registered nurse, licensed practical/vocational nurse, nursing assistant/aid, patient care assistant/aid/technician, and pre-nursing studies. (Course list I used as a reference) - Clinical practicums, hands on experience in a variety of healthcare settings - Proficiency exams

Note: Medical school and nursing school are TWO DIFFERENT PROGRAMS. Nursing majors have the lowest acceptance rate into medical schools compared to other pre-med pathways. Nursing school focuses on patient care, communication, and practical skills from a care perspective, while medical school focuses on theory, diagnosis, and treatment.

Pre-Employment Certifications (required by Pony Express):

1. Phlebotomy Certification Program: 4-8 month course - Draw blood and other samples from patients. 2. First Aid Certification: 4-6 hour course - Training on how to respond to medical emergencies. 3. Basic and Professional Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) Certification: 3-5 hour course - How to perform CPR and other life-saving techniques in an emergency 4. Basic Life Support (BLS) Certification: 4-5 hour course - Providing immediate care during cardiac or respiratory emergencies 5. Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support (ACLS) Certification: 6-15 hour course - Basic life support skills

All certifications are valid for 2 years before renewal is necessary. Considering the length of their trips it is reasonable to assume that she would be required to take refresher courses after each haul.

Other Pre-Employment Requirements:

1. Drug screening at a Pony Express designed facility.

2. Verification of physical and mental fitness.

3. Personality test (one of those 'we are a fun employer!' type things that actually means 'we want to identify possible problem areas'... eugh).

Employment Training Curriculum (Onboarding)

1. Medical Care Person in Charge (PIC) Course Variation - This is a course that prepared mariners to provide medical care to people who are sick or injured on a ship. Skills Pony Express Requires: Taking medical history, physical assessments, medication administration, intravenous therapy, wound care, infection control, and record keeping.

2. Standards of Training, Certification, and Watchkeeping (STCW) Variation - These are internationally recognized rules that direct knowledge and skills mariners need to perform their jobs safely. Skills Pony Express Requires: Personal survival techniques, firefighting/prevention, elementary first aid, personal safety and social responsibility, and proficiency in security awareness.

3. OSHA Outreach Training Program Variation - 10 hour course for entry-level workers on general safety and health hazards. - 30 hour course for supervisors and workers with safety responsibility covering a wider range of safety topics and in-depth industry-specific training. Skills Pony Express Requires: Recognition, avoidance, abatement, and prevention of workplace hazards.

Company Sanctioned Postmortem Curriculum

In the case of unexpected death there must be a certification program Anya had to complete when it comes to proper disposal or storage of a corpse. Of course, I don't mean embalming (as much as I am begging and pleading for a Mortician Anya AU), but I'd assume on a long-haul the presence of a body may cause issues.

I air more on the side of "storage" over disposal, assuming that families would want their loved one returned to them.

Proper disinfecting of the corpse and affected areas (especially death due to communicable disease), accounting for personal belongs, and logging details regarding the death would be of the upmost importance. Subsequent bagging of the body and storage in a cryogenic pod would be the most reasonable route of action.

If you stuck with me through this post you are a saint and I love you.

#mouthwashing #anya mouthwashing #mouthwashing anya #mouthwashing headcanons #pony express

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