OCA’s COVID-19 Business Continuity Plans
March 12, 2020 | COBRA COVID-19 Quick Alerts
OCA’s Business Continuity Plans
COVID-19 is obviously front and center on the minds of people and companies across the world. As your trusted partner, we feel it’s important to give our clients insight into our business continuity planning, so that you can feel confident that we are taking appropriate, proactive measures to minimize disruption to our service and business operations.
We have a comprehensive plan in place to service our clients in the event this situation escalates – here are a few highlights:
- Business continuity planning: We are actively reviewing and refining our disaster recovery and business continuity plans to ensure that appropriate measures and controls are defined and followed. This includes procedures to ensure our ability to continue business operations should our primary physical space become unavailable – including enabling staff to work from home.
- Testing the program: Testing allows us to validate the effectiveness of the business continuity and recovery procedures, and our readiness to respond to changing circumstances – including but not limited to office closures and quarantines, as well as public transportation and critical service provider disruptions.
- Extending Employees Debit Card Time Out length: To prevent any disruption to our members benefit accounts, OCA will be extending the submission time frame for card transactions that require substantiation. Typically, employees will have up to 30 days to submit documentation before their debit card is temporarily timed out. OCA will not be deactivating any debit card swipes until April 31st at the earliest.
- Operational preparedness: We have implemented new processes and tested our mass communication tools to ensure we can quickly and efficiently engage with internal and external partners in the event we need to reach out with important information and updates.
- Proactive risk mitigation: In lieu of conducting onsite client meetings we are recommending conference calls and online training webinars in order to protect the health and safety of our internal and external OCA family.
- Employee awareness & prevention: We have launched an internal education program to ensure our employees understand risks and take proper precautions – from using hand sanitizer, to washing hands frequently, to proper cough/sneezing etiquette, to sending sick employees’ home.
- Management oversight and governance: The entire OCA executive and management team has been actively involved in business continuity and disaster recovery planning to ensure we’re ready as this situation unfolds.
We will continue to monitor this situation and act based on World Health Organization (WHO) and Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidance as needed. In the meantime, it is business as usual – while practicing recommended precautions and continuing to prepare for scenarios that may arise. If you have further questions or concerns, please contact your service or account representatives.