Influx of apps transforms hazard reporting

The world of workplace safety is surpassing the humdrum of required training sessions and mandatory forms, going at lightning speed to where anyone, anywhere, can report a job site hazard or near miss — occurrences and situations that could lead to disaster.

How? There’s now an app for that. Many, in fact.

Walk any exhibition floor at any safety conference, and one will see screen shots on display of smartphone and tablet apps that aim to provide an easy way for workers to warn each other of potential hazards on the job.

“It’s just a matter of time before those little issues become big ones,” said Melissa Schultz, co-founder and training and customer development leader at Chicago-based SitePatterns LLC, which offers a program she helped develop that aims to help safety personnel at construction sites manage claims early and on-site by punching in data and taking photos.

Tracking near misses is just another function, she said.

“Traditional claims software is missing all those near misses and less severe incidents,” she said. “Everybody has a phone in their pocket, so there is no excuse not to take a photo and report.”

The Campbell Institute at the Itasca, Illinois-based National Safety Council in 2018 caught on to the notion that keeping tabs on the smaller incidents — which traditional and mandatory incident reporting does not require — is likely to have an effect on overall safety.

In its research, the institute noted that since 1993, the total recordable incident rate has dropped from a high of about 8.5 recordable incidents per 200,000 working hours to less than three incidents per 200,000 hours in 2016, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2017, the most recent available. However, “workplace injuries should not be overshadowed by another more disturbing trend in workplace safety, namely that the number of life-altering injuries and fatal incidents has been on a much slower decline,” institute researchers wrote in a paper in 2018.

The message to safety professionals?

Pay attention to the near misses that can lead to major incidents. They all have what the institute called “serious injury and fatality” potential, according to the paper published by the council.

Apps, which are widely available, are making it easier for employers to track hazards and to make necessary changes immediately, said John Dony, the Campbell Institute’s director.

Apps “put the power in the workers’ hands to do the reporting” and failing to give a worker a method for immediate reporting “hinders reporting” of unsafe conditions, he said.

“You are getting intelligence right away on what is happening in the field,” Mr. Dony said. “You are able to get real-time (data) on your near misses and potentials, and (this) gives you the opportunity to fix something before there’s an event. That’s why organizations are adopting (apps).”

Reporting near misses and hazards — which allow users to time-stamp a report, submit a photo or geotrack a location — wasn’t the original goal of most of the safety apps that aim to make reporting incidents quicker and more efficient, according to experts and developers.

Lost or late paperwork is troublesome because such issues can lead to incident or accident claims going unreported or key facts getting lost, according to experts.

“Most of the time when there is an issue in workers comp, it means there were people in the field and then other people in a remote office, in environments where it is not always easy to pull out a sheet of paper and take notes,” said Pankaj Malviya, founder and chief executive officer of San Jose, California-based Pulpstream, an app developer.

“Apps allow them to capture the information quickly, and it’s rich information,” on an incident, he said, listing several points of data that a reporting app can capture: global positioning, photographs, sketches of what occurred, signatures of witnesses and more. Reports, if necessary, can go to the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration or a claims adjuster.

Safety audits are also made simpler, he said: “They used to do all the audits and assessments on paper, and the paper would come back to the office, and then three copies, scan one, then fax. This was consuming time they could devote to something else.”

Steve Piatkowski, Philadelphia-based senior vice president of environmental risk at Chubb Ltd., said the insurer caught the trend early on, following its development of an “instant alert” website form that made reporting incidents simpler.

Then came the app, he said.

“Now that everybody has a smartphone, the app is now an instantaneous way to report an incident,” he said of Chubb’s safety and reporting app, which it offers to policyholders. That program also provides real-time tracking on incident responses and claims handling, he said.

“We are seeing the cost savings as a result of being involved (within) minutes,” he said.

The costs for the apps vary, with companies quoting $20 to $100 per user per month, depending on the app’s capabilities.