Register Now — NAOHP Virtual Conference 2026 | September 17–18
This year the conference comes to you. For the first time, NAOHP's annual conference goes fully virtual — two days of practical, program-tested education from your desk, no travel, no time out of the office.
One day — Members $300 · Non-members $400
Both days — Members $500 · Non-members $700
September 17 — Day 1, if you run the program. Six sessions on what actually lands on a program director's desk: what your peers launched this year and what it earned, winning and keeping employer accounts, proving ROI with the Big 4, pricing and P&L and the KPIs worth tracking, getting your EHR to tell you something useful, and building wellness into a real service line.
September 18 — Day 2, if you see the patients. Most clinicians practicing occupational medicine didn't train in it — they landed in it, and then someone handed them a comp file and expected a defensible restriction by end of day. Seven sessions on exactly that: work-relatedness and causation, OSHA recordability, DOT/FMCSA updates including what marijuana legalization did to drug screens, return-to-work and functional restrictions, injury-management refreshers with referral red flags, and regulated exams and surveillance. Continuing education credit will be available.
Both days is $500 for members. If you run a program and see patients — plenty of you do — that's the one. Faculty are confirming now and the final agenda lands in August.
Bringing your team? Corporate members - Add Day 1 seats for $75 each at checkout.
Provider Course graduates: your $100 discount code is in the member community.
Showing the Work: The Flu Shots Your Remote Workers Never Get Counted
This came out of flu-season planning with a health system's employee health program this week, anonymized as always. They vaccinate 25,000 employees every fall. Roughly 500 trained “flu champions” — nurses and MAs spread across the system — give the shots and log each one into a mobile tracking app that drops straight into the employee's health record. It's a tight operation, with one blind spot.
About a hundred of those employees work remotely, in other states. The central campaign can't reach them. They get sent to a retail pharmacy on their own, told to bring back a receipt, and someone keys the record in by hand weeks later — if it comes back at all. Some get charged at the counter and never bother. Every one of those is a compliance record the program can't count and an employee who just learned that staying compliant is their problem, not the program's.
Almost every multi-site employer has this exact gap. Your program is built for the people in the building. The compliance you can't see lives in the ones who aren't — remote workers, satellite sites, the third shift two states away. They're the smallest slice of the roster and the biggest share of your missing records.
Close it before the season starts, not during it. Pull the distributed-workforce roster now — who's remote, where they are — and pre-assign each person to a vetted local clinic that can give the shot and send documentation back in the same standardized format your in-house team uses. One workflow, one record layout, everyone counted. The team behind this drove its flu-tracking error rate from 37% in its first season down to under 1% by getting every vaccinator onto one documented workflow — which is exactly what a mailed-in retail receipt is not.
Programs miss it because the remote handful looks too small to engineer for. It isn't. A hundred uncounted flu shots is a hundred holes in your surveillance data, a hundred employees paying out of pocket for something you cover, and a hundred conversations in December about why the numbers don't reconcile. The fix is a scheduling problem, not a clinical one — but only if you start in August.
Standing up a repeatable, documented program workflow — the rosters, the site assignments, the one-record-layout discipline — is exactly what the operational toolkits in the Member Library are built for.
Members, get your free toolkit here:
—Larry
The core provider actions, the Dashboard domains, and the clinical decision standards behind them are the curriculum of the OccMed Providers Course —
If your providers are the ones making the calls that drive your employer outcomes, this is the program built for them.
Remote Clinic for Agility — from Net Health
Leave the workstation behind. Remote Clinic for Agility brings point-of-care documentation to your on-site vaccine and fit test events.
🗓 Upcoming Events
Becoming a Safety Leader in Healthcare
The Expanding Role of the Nurse in Health Care Safety
Goal: Master the evolving intersection of occupational health and safety leadership.
Key Topics:
• Shifting expectations of OHNs: from clinical care to system safety oversight.
• Understanding the dual lens of employee and patient safety.
• Introduction to Total Worker Health® principles in hospital settings.
• The business case for nurse-led safety programs (ROI, risk reduction, engagement).
Target Audience:
Registered Nurses, Occupational Health Nurses, and Employee Health professionals transitioning into or expanding safety leadership roles in healthcare systems.
Free Intro Class:
Speaker: Shanna Dunbar
The first cohort for the full course is coming this fall.
Occupational Medicine Growth Cohort
The Occupational Medicine Growth Cohort gives your team the structure, language, tools, and accountability to build a more consistent employer growth system.
Built on NAOHP's occupational medicine sales-training foundation, delivered in partnership with WebForDoctors.
Purpose Built Occupational Health EMR
🏭 Occupational Health Industry News & Signals
OSHA's federal heat push quietly expired — and the standard behind it stalled.
OSHA's National Emphasis Program on heat — the initiative that drove heat-focused inspections since 2022 — lapsed on April 8, 2026, and the agency has not renewed it. The permanent Heat Injury and Illness Prevention standard remains stuck: OSHA published the proposed rule in August 2024, the comment period closed January 14, 2025, and nothing has moved since, with no target date on the regulatory agenda. Federal heat enforcement now falls back to the General Duty Clause and to the state plans — California, Oregon, Washington, and others — that set their own heat rules.
Source: OSHA — Heat rulemaking · Ogletree
What it means for you: A stalled federal standard doesn't lower the clinical bar — it raises what rides on your providers' judgment. No new checklist is coming to tell them when a worker's headache and cramps are early heat illness, whether a collapse on a hot loading dock is recordable, or when to pull someone off the line. In the hottest stretch of the year, that call sits with the clinician in the room. Make sure they're trained to make it and to document the work-relatedness cleanly.
Recognizing, managing, and recording heat illness on defensible clinical footing is core provider competence — exactly what the OccMed Providers Course builds. → Enroll in the OccMed Providers Course
DOT is adding fentanyl to the federal drug-testing panel.
The Department of Transportation has proposed adding fentanyl and norfentanyl to the DOT drug-testing panel, harmonizing it with the HHS Mandatory Guidelines for urine and oral-fluid testing. The proposed rule, published in the Federal Register on September 2, 2025, also raises the morphine screening and confirmation cutoffs and adjusts Medical Review Officer verification steps. It isn't final yet — but once it publishes, every DOT-regulated employer's panel expands: new analytes, new cutoffs, a new MRO workflow.
Source: Federal Register · Morgan Lewis
What it means for you: Nothing goes sideways the day the rule drops if you've lined it up in advance. Confirm your lab is ready to run the expanded panel, that your MRO knows the revised verification steps and the new morphine cutoffs, and that your DOT policy language and consent forms name the added analytes. The programs that get caught flat-footed are the ones that find out from a positive they don't know how to verify. Get ahead of it now.
Keeping regulated drug-testing programs current with federal panel and MRO changes is what OccNation is for. → Track the change on OccNation
Workers' comp premiums are flat while the cost of each claim keeps climbing.
NCCI's 2026 State of the Line put private-carrier net written premium essentially flat — down 0.2% to $41.6 billion — even as medical and indemnity claim severity each rose 4% for the year. The line still looked profitable, at a 91% calendar-year combined ratio, but the accident-year combined ratio came in at 102% — meaning the current book of claims is running at a loss, and the paper profit is coming from releasing prior years' reserves. The cushion is thinning while the cost per injury rises.
Source: NCCI 2026 State of the Line · Risk & Insurance
What it means for you: When severity climbs and premium doesn't, carriers and employers both start looking hard at what actually moves cost per claim — injury management, return-to-work discipline, and heading off the downstream utilization that turns a strain into a six-figure file. That is your program's value, and most programs can't put a number on it. Show an employer what your occ-health program saves on their comp line and you stop being a cost center in the renewal conversation.
Putting a defensible dollar figure on what your program contributes — and what the gaps cost — is what the Executive Diagnostic delivers. → Run the Executive Diagnostic