EMS service finds new life providing workplace COVID screening

Alex Pollak built a multimillion-dollar business connecting the country’s largest music festivals to paramedics and EMTs. Then the music stopped.

Festivals had come to represent about 60% of revenue for Pollak’s company, Paradocs. With events canceled during the pandemic, Paradocs has found a lifeline in conducting daily temperature checks and facilitating Covid-19 testing for companies as New Yorkers start returning to work.

Although the jury is still out on whether workplace temperature checks will be effective in stopping the spread of the disease among employees, Paradocs has brought on about 80 offices, construction sites and essential businesses as clients.

Paradocs has grabbed a large share of the business in the niche.

“I really felt like my world was falling apart in the middle of March, and a lot of times I doubted we’d be able to survive it,” Pollak said. “But every day I get more and more positive. We’re in a unique position because we’re a rapidly deployable medical solution.”

Looking for opportunities

Pollak was a project manager at an ambulance company, moonlighting as a paramedic, when he founded Paradocs in 2011. He noticed that security companies needed help coordinating medical services for events after working several gigs himself. The company added high-profile events such as the Governors Ball to its roster in 2014 and steadily gained more business around the country, deploying some of its 2,600 medical professionals to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Citi Field and New York Fashion Week.

Paradocs generated about $4.8 million in revenue last year and was on track to clear that number this year before Covid-19 began making its way around the globe.

“We had almost doubled our festivals this summer,” Pollak said. “We would have grossed at least $2 million more in contracts than we had done last year. Our growth has been steady, but aside from the first few years, it hasn’t grown exponentially like it would have this summer.”

Its last major event was the Okeechobee Music and Arts Festival in Florida, which ran through March 8, the day before Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a pandemic-related state of emergency.

When Pollak returned to New York, the state was beginning its ascent into a crisis that would peak with 11,571 people testing positive April 14.

The company’s staff, a mix of full-time employees and contractors, were in high demand. Doctors and nurses who supplement their income by working for Paradocs were needed to treat Covid-19 patients. Others, including Pollak, signed up with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assist with the crisis response.

Pollak first tried to reconfigure the company to address the medical emergency. Paradocs has experience constructing temporary medical facilities for major events, so it began working with the city and explored staffing the Javits Center field hospital.

“We went through a very frustrating few weeks of building out the plans, submitting the bids,” Pollak said. “And then the federal government sort of took over.”

He said he almost closed his business in April, when his medical malpractice policy was set to renew. But he was able to defer payments on the plan, which costs Paradocs in the six figures annually, until June 30. By that point, thanks to the shift in strategy, business had picked up enough to justify staying open.

As New York began its phased reopening, Paradocs at first worked with essential businesses including supermarkets, such as ShopRite, and delivery services, such as FreshDirect, to conduct temperature screenings and health questionnaires as workers started their shift. When construction resumed during phase one, the company found work at some of those job sites and began in turn drawing interest from building managers.

Production companies also started reaching out about film and photo shoots. Paradocs staffed as many as 200 sets on July 20 across New York (shoots with fewer than 10 people have been allowed since phase two but totally came back that day, when phase four began), as well as in California, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

“Some of them are really small and would have never hired a set medic, but now they need to present a safety plan,” Pollak said.

Although providing temperature checks is a major part of Paradocs’ new business model, not everyone agrees that they provide much value in keeping employees safe.

Guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the disease, which can spread before a person presents symptoms, has evolved throughout the pandemic. The CDC now says screening employees for a fever is an optional strategy that might not be completely effective. If temperature checks are implemented, the agency encourages employers to tell workers to stay home if they have a fever equal to or higher than 100.4.

Fever screening and self-assessments are effective only when accompanied by social distancing, mask wearing and adequate workplace ventilation, said Dr. Saul Helman, a partner at consulting firm Guidehouse, which has been advising employers.

“Temperature checks and risk-assessment-type surveys have become very helpful in the first levels of screening of people before they come into an office building,” Helman said. “It’s not an ultimate layer. It’s not going to prevent every infected person from walking in.”

Dr. Mark Cunningham-Hill, medical director at the Northeast Business Group on Health, agreed.

Temperature screening is “probably more reassuring than effective,” Cunningham-Hill said.

Pollak said he sees value in Paradocs’ workplace service, even if his company is simply providing peace of mind to skittish workers and office managers.

He said he’s hoping the new business model this year will help Paradocs match even half the revenue it generated last year.

“Our business is not growing, but at least it’s growing in areas that we would have never touched,” Pollak said. “Who would have been taking temperatures last year?”