The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that roughly 4 to 6 thousand workplace fatalities and between 3.9 and 4.5 million nonfatal injuries and illnesses occur each year.

In 1970, Congress enacted the Occupational Safety and Health Act as a means to protect workers from known hazards in the workplace. The OSH Act compelled employers to prepare and maintain records related to occupational injuries and illnesses. Recordkeeping was implemented as a way to track various accidents or illnesses occurring in a particular workplace or industry. Data from these records is used by OSHA to implement further regulations or target inspections to correct problem areas.

In 2001, OSHA updated the standard (29 CFR 1904) to simplify the reporting rules and forms and bring about greater accountability for injury and illness recordkeeping. Employers covered by the regulation, generally those with more than 10 employees, are required to:

• Notify OSHA of work-related incidents that result in employee deaths or inpatient hospitalization of 3 or more employees, within 8 hours after they occur
• Provide injury and illness records within 4 business hours of request by an OSHA representative
• Fill out required OSHA injury and illness recordkeeping forms within 7 days of a recordable incident
• Annually post, from February 1–April 30, a summary (OSHA Form 300A) of all workplace injuries and illnesses, and make the form clearly visible to employees and new applicants

Managing this process on paper is costly and cumbersome, and often the information is difficult to find by sifting through file cabinets, spreadsheets, etc.

Employers who fail to maintain up-to-date and accurate records may find themselves facing citation and fines. What’s more, however, organizations have recognized that the actual costs from lost work days and productivity is substantially higher – thanks to increased workers’ compensation claims, potential liability, downtime and internal disruption, negative press, or worse, lost revenues. Therefore, it is critical that organizations implement a solution to ensure compliance with the OSHA recordkeeping mandate.

MSDSonline has responded by developing revolutionary, on-demand (cloud-computing), EH&S compliance management solutions. These solutions were created to help safety professionals better understand and manage their risks, simplify compliance, promote a safer work environment and implement sustainability practices throughout their organization.

We’ve built a comprehensive injury and illness recordkeeping application, our Incident Management Account designed to centralize the recording, tracking and reporting of workplace injuries, illnesses, exposures and other incidents in order to streamline compliance with the Recordkeeping Standard. We’ve integrated the often disparate processes of incident notification, case management/recordkeeping and followup into a single collaborative application.

Our easy-to-use, Web-based system allows safety professionals to consolidate all of their workplace incident information into one convenient application. Here, they can run analytics to better identify workplace hazards, understand the root causes and implement corrective actions in order to build a culture of zero-incidents within the work environment.

Environmental health & safety (EH&S) and HR professionals are continuously asked to do more with fewer resources. The demands for staying compliant are getting more difficult no matter what industry you’re in or how big your organization is. Managing your workplace injuries and illnesses, and helping employees avoid risks from hazards, is critical to your business.

A minor accident or exposure can have serious implications in terms of lost productivity, skyrocketing insurance costs and workers’ compensation claims, not to mention possible litigation costs and fines for non-compliance.

At MSDSonline, we understand the importance of protecting your most valuable assets – your employees. Our goal is to help business of all sizes improve workplace safety, and ultimately, simplify compliance. We designed our Incident Management Account to enable safety or HR managers to centralize OSHA recordkeeping, tracking and reporting of workplace injuries, illnesses, exposures and other incidents in order to help them better identify workplace hazards, understand the root causes and implement corrective actions to prevent accidents from reoccurring.

Here are Some Key Reasons to Choose Incident Management from MSDSonline:

• Put your company on a path toward zero incidents
• Quickly identify safety risks and hazard trends in your workplace
• More effectively push safety initiatives throughout your entire organization
• Eliminate disparate and redundant paper-based injury and illness recordkeeping processes
• Lower costs associated with accidents and employee incidents
• Save time and money in meeting OSHA Recordkeeping compliance requirements