Register Now - Earlybird discount — NAOHP Virtual Conference 2026 | September 17–18
This year, we're bringing the conference to you. For the first time, NAOHP's annual conference goes fully virtual — two days of practical, program-tested education you can attend from your desk, with no travel and no time out of the office.
Day 1 — For Program Directors & Administrators (Sept 17)
Grow your program and prove its value: fresh ideas from your peers, winning and keeping employer accounts, the latest OSHA and DOT compliance changes, pricing and P&L fundamentals, turning your EHR and data into better decisions, and building Advanced Primary Care and wellness into a revenue line.
Day 2 — For Providers (Sept 18)
Built for physicians and APPs who have some experience in occupational medicine, or you have taken our Occmed for Providers course and you’re ready for more: the "Big 4" of provider performance, work-relatedness and causation, OSHA recordability, DOT/FMCSA updates (including marijuana and drug-screen impacts), return-to-work and restrictions, injury-management refreshers, and regulated exams and surveillance. Continuing education credit will be available.
Whether you lead an occupational health program, see patients, or work across employee health, urgent care, safety, or PT/OT — there's a full day here for you.
Showing the Work: The New-Hire TB Test Nobody Comes Back For
This one came up in four separate interviews during a health-system assessment this week, anonymized as always. Almost every employee health program has the same problem.
The two-step TB skin test needs the worker back 48 to 72 hours after each placement. Half of them don't return. One team put its no-return rate near 50%, and said half of the people they reschedule miss that visit too. Every no-show becomes a phone call, then another, then a fax, then a manual note in the system. Staff lose hours a week chasing a test that should take minutes — and new hires start work uncleared while it drags out.
The fix has been available for years: move new-hire screening from the two-step skin test to an interferon-gamma blood test, QuantiFERON or T-SPOT. One blood draw. No return visit. No 72-hour window. No chase calls. The lab reports the result, and the compliance gap closes on its own.
Most programs haven't switched because nobody has put the rework on paper. The skin test looks cheaper per unit. The full cost, however, includes the staff time spent running down no-shows, the delayed clearances, and the workers on the floor before their screening is closed out. Priced that way, the blood test usually wins on labor alone.
We built a tool for exactly this, and it's in the Member Library. It walks you to the right test for your setting and shows the cost the two-step is quietly running up. It sits alongside guidance on when TB testing is actually required, how risk-based surveillance works, and how to stand up compliant testing without the paper chase.
—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.
Purpose Built Occupational Health EMR
Parkview Occupational Health Earns NAOHP Recertification
Parkview Occupational Health (POHC), part of Parkview Employer Solutions, has been awarded a three-year NAOHP Program Certification following a comprehensive review of all eighteen recertification standards.
Serving employers across Northeast Indiana and Northwest Ohio through thirteen clinic locations — plus on-site, near-site, virtual, and remote-clearance care — POHC demonstrated a mature quality infrastructure, including a formally governed policy manual, a quantified physician chart-review program, multi-year outcomes tracking, and a monthly Net Promoter Score program spanning patients, providers, and employer clients.
Congratulations to Medical Director Michael Knipp, MD, Corporate Director Shanda Gurrola, and the entire POHC team. Certification runs through July 2029.
🗓 Upcoming Events
Prove Your Value: Hardwiring Client Communication & ROI in Occ Med
Client communication is essential to a successful Occ Med program.
How timely and thorough is your communication process?
Does your EMR assist you in that process?
Can you demonstrate a value/ROI to your clients?
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 Health Industry News & Signals
DOT's Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse tightens — enforcement is now automatic.
Two changes are worth flagging for any program running DOT work. Starting April 27, 2026, FMCSA requires identity verification through a secure web application to register certain Clearinghouse accounts. And with Clearinghouse II fully in force, state licensing agencies now automatically downgrade the CDL of any driver in "prohibited" status until the return-to-duty process is complete. The database is no longer just a reporting tool — it's wired directly into whether a driver can legally work.
Source: FMCSA Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse Drug & Alcohol ClearinghouseHVI
What it means for you: If you're the medical piece of an employer's DOT program, the margin for a paperwork lag just shrank. A missed pre-employment or annual query, or a slow SAP and return-to-duty handoff, now carries a faster, harder consequence for the driver and the carrier. Confirm your query cadence is current, and make sure your MRO and SAP referral path moves without delay.
Compare how other programs are handling the tighter DOT workflow in OccNation. → Talk it through in OccNation
Workforce drug positivity keeps climbing — and the specimen you pick changes what you catch.
Quest released its 2026 Drug Testing Index this week. Nearly one in five general-workforce hair tests came back positive in 2025 (19.1%), up about 46% from 13.1% in 2021, with marijuana the primary driver across every specimen type — 4.4% in urine, 11.1% in oral fluid, and 15.1% in hair. Quest also noted an April 2026 federal order moving to reclassify medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, with an expedited hearing on broader reclassification.
Source: Quest Diagnostics 2026 Drug Testing Index PR NewswirePR Newswire
What it means for you: Two takeaways for employer clients. The specimen matters — hair and oral fluid surface far more marijuana than urine and resist tampering, so panel and method choice is a real safety decision, not a formality. And the rescheduling move is worth watching but not acting on yet; DOT testing rules haven't changed, and marijuana stays prohibited for safety-sensitive drivers. Counsel clients to hold their current panels and track the rulemaking.
Sizing the drug-testing demand in a market — by sector, tuned to safety-sensitive workforces — is exactly what a focused Market Analyzer run answers. → Size your market with the Market Analyzer
The federal vaccine schedule is in flux. Your occupational requirements are not.
The CDC's advisory framework has been unusually unsettled. HHS removed all 17 sitting ACIP members in June 2025 and seated a reconstituted committee, then changed parts of the immunization schedule in January 2026. In March 2026, a federal court stayed the revised 2026 schedule and the post-June-2025 committee actions, largely reverting the adult and childhood schedules to their January 2025 versions.
Source: Congressional Research Service, "Changes to CDC Vaccine Recommendations in 2025 and 2026" Congress.gov + 2
What it means for you: Worker immunization in occupational settings doesn't ride on the CDC schedule alone. OSHA's Bloodborne Pathogens Standard independently requires you to offer hepatitis B vaccination to occupationally exposed workers, and facility and state rules for healthcare personnel — MMR, varicella, Tdap, annual influenza — are set on their own track. Anchor your employee-health protocols to those standing requirements, document immunity cleanly, and don't let federal-schedule noise open a compliance gap.
Worker immunization, exposure follow-up, and the standards behind them are core clinical ground in the OccMed Providers Course. → Get your providers current in the OccMed Providers Course