Incident Management: Reporting and Managing Employee Accidents and Exposures

Healthcare industry leaders looking for ways to reduce expenses and increase profits are increasingly looking to tools that monitor employee health and wellness to assess the costs of injuries and other incidents.

In late March, Net Health sponsored a webinar hosted by Occupational Health and Safety Magazine called “Incident Management – Reporting and Managing Employee Accidents and Exposures.” This event highlighted Net Health® Occupational Medicine, including the reports you can run to help with work-related injuries.

Workforce Statistics

There are 340 million occupational accidents and 160 million work-related illnesses each year in the U.S. Slips, trips, falls, overexertion, bodily reaction, and contact with objects account for 84% of all non-fatal injuries involving time away from work. In 2020, 36,840 workplace injuries were caused by exposure to harmful substances or environments.¹ With numbers this high, the question becomes how employers can combat these injuries and illnesses and keep their workers safe and healthy.

Creating a safer workplace requires the right reporting tools to identify, manage, and ultimately decrease these numbers.

Using Software Tools to Track Incidents and Injuries 

Net Health® Occupational Medicine has multiple features that can help gather and process information so that reports present a detailed picture of problematic areas to target. For example, the Safety and Infection Control reporting tab can allow users to see the most common types of injuries in an organization and the locations where these occur by pulling information from incident reports.

These reporting tools make it easier to plan interventions that address an organization’s actual issues.

Generating Actionable Occupational Medicine Reports

Users of the software can also choose to run reports on Safety and Infection Control. There are 13 reports available on Incidents and Safety, six reports on Case Management, and five on Exposure Management. For example, a detailed incident listing describes each recorded employee incident. Each illness, injury, and exposure can be viewed by choosing a date range.

The sorting variables allow a more granular view of the data. OccMed professionals can sort by variables such as the nature of the incident, the affected body part, the root cause, the diagnosis, the physician who treated the employee, the severity of the injury, and more. Specific details such as employee names or a doctor’s charting notes can easily be left out of the report to make them shareable without violating privacy.

The Importance of Thorough Incident Reporting

A software’s reporting is only as good as the information it can pull from incident records. Employees who input this information need to provide the granular detail in the first place, but doing so can also help flag problem areas that come up repeatedly.

Of course, many of these incidents are Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)-recordable and therefore come with tracking and reporting requirements, so organizations typically have this data available.²

Tracking Costs with Case Management Reports

The March webinar also demonstrated Case Management reports to help employers identify potential problems such as excessive days missed after an incident or costs related to specific departments or employees. By limiting the report’s date range, organizations can also track when specific injuries, illnesses, or exposures take place. 

All of these options present different opportunities for identifying the issues most relevant to a particular organization so they can pinpoint where they are spending the most money and, most importantly, where opportunities exist to protect their employees from workplace incidents. 

Learn more by viewing the webinar below..

References:

¹ LegalJobs, “Slips, Trips, and Falls: 22 Work Injury Statistics for 2022,” July 6, 2021.
² Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), “Detailed Guidance for OSHA’s Injury and Illness Recordkeeping Rule,” Accessed March 22, 2022.