Incidents can happen at any time of day. The injuries that occur can range from minor cut requiring a band-aid to more life-threatening incidents and in worst case scenarios event death. The ability for employees to quickly report incidents is critical to the safety of everyone within an organization. In addition, OSHA and other regulatory bodies require injuries to be reported in a timely manner. In 2023, there were 859 reported deaths to OSHA (U.S. Department of Labor – OSHA, 2025). Failing to report, results in fines, penalties, and a range of other negative impacts to the organization.
Between keeping everyone safe and abiding to regulations, the key is to collect information that is accurate, consistent, and allows operations and management to follow-up quickly. Many organizations rely on injury hotlines for reporting. While this is easily accessible to most employees, there is a strong possibility and probability that human error will occur when this information must be typed in manually. Human data entry errors while seemingly small can lead to serious ramifications if the correct supervisor or safety professional isn’t notified on time. For safety professionals, inaccuracies also impact the ability for them to follow-up and perform investigations to prevent future incidents from happening.
One way to solve this dilemma is to connect the data the hotline is collecting with the data provided by an organization’s HR department and location structure in an easy-to-use platform for follow-up by management and safety. Within an Enterprise Incident Management tool, organizations can leverage integrations with the Third-Party hotline and HR department to seamlessly populate employee details like the employee’s name, department, supervisor, and other critical details accurately. When organizations can minimize the effects of human error in reporting information the ramifications can be positive and far sweeping.
Accurate incident reports, within the right tool, can do the following:
- Trigger automatic and time-sensitive notifications to key stakeholders
- With an Incident Management platform, notifications can trigger by the severity of the incident. Low to moderate can simply trigger an email to supervisors and safety for follow-up, where high and life-threatening severities can be redirected to text message notifications to safety and executive leaders within the organization as soon as the incident is reported.
- Allow for accurate claims processing
- With the elimination of manual entry in the key reporting fields easily categorize and drill down to key metrics without combing through misspelled words.
- Provide critical details for further investigations and mitigation efforts
- Using these key metrics you can identify the areas in your organization that are resulting in the highest occurrence of injuries. This then allows a re-focus on training and organizational prevention efforts.
- Build trust with employees
- By making concerted efforts to improve safety, organizations build trust with their employees (and future job seekers) that success is defined not just by the bottom line, but also by how well they take care of their employees.
All of these steps further increase organizational excellence and promote a culture of safety for everyone involved.
Works Cited
U.S. Department of Labor – OSHA. (2025, February 28). Injury Tracking Application (ITA) Data. Retrieved from OSHA: https://www.osha.gov/Establishment-Specific-Injury-and-Illness-Data
AUTHOR BIO:-
Stephenie Langston began her career as a bench scientist in infectious disease laboratories before joining the Environmental, Health, and Safety department at the University of Florida. While at UF, Stephenie worked in lab safety, biosafety/IBC, and served as the EHS consultant to the IACUC. During her time, she managed safety concerns and successfully facilitated the IBC’s transition from paper to the online Biosafety Permits module.
In addition to her role at UF, Stephenie was an active member of CSHEMA and co-founder of their Animal Research Health & Safety Community of Practice which aims to bridge the communication gap between safety and animal husbandry. Stephenie holds a Master of Science in Biotechnology from the University of Central Florida and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Florida. Stephenie is passionate about process improvement and brings a unique skillset to the team that is founded in hard work, adapting to change, and making safety more approachable for everyone.
