New app to stop employees pulling a sickie

TELLING your boss you weren’t at work because you were bitten by rabid bloodthirsty squirrels with crazy eyes, then bringing a bogus doctor’s note to prove it, will no longer work.

A new web application called eDoctorsNote was designed and developed mainly to help doctors and employers keep track of sick notes, especially fake ones, and to curb absenteeism caused by unnecessary sick leave, said Duke Mpapele, managing director at Leverage Point, creators of the app.

Research conducted and reported by the Occupational Care of South Africa shows that 40 percent of sick notes were given without diagnoses. And this has a huge impact because employers lose out on man hours unnecessarily, and have to pay for sick leave days when the employee isn’t actually sick.

The country loses between R12 billion to R16bn a year on sick leave, Mpapele said.

“Doctors register on eDoctorsNote, we verify their credentials, mainly their registration with the Health Professions Council of South Africa ( HPCSA), then we issue them with log in details so they are able to add sick leave days.”

Only a registered doctor can use the app. After seeing a patient and having to issue a note, they log on to eDoctorsNote, capture the patient’s name, surname and ID number, then capture the number of days the person is declared unfit for work.

When the employee goes back to work, they simply notify their employer (if subscribed to eDoctorsNote) of the sick days granted by a valid doctor, which can be checked on the app.

If the doctor is not registered on the eDoctorsNote network, the employee can return to work with a paper sick note, the employer ( subscriber of eDoctorsNote) can capture the paper sick note on to the web application, the system verifies the validity of the sick note, and the doctor’s details with the HPCSA.