This Memorial Day
Memorial Day asks us to remember the men and women who died serving the country. We hold them in our thoughts today.
The work we do connects to that memory in a quiet way. Occupational health exists because work carries risk, and someone has to look out for the people who shoulder it. Service members understood risk better than most. So do the workers we see every day—the ones on the line, in the rig, on the road, behind the wheel of a CMV.
We can't honor the fallen by lowering a flag alone. We honor them by taking the safety of working people seriously, every shift, in every clinic and on every job site. That's the part within our reach.
To the families carrying loss this weekend: we're thinking of you. To everyone heading back to work on Tuesday: be well, and stay safe out there.
The number you set once and try not to think about again
There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over a clinic owner the moment someone asks, "How'd you land on $85 for a DOT physical?"
Because the honest answer is usually some version of: that's roughly what the place down the road charges, and nobody's complained.
If that stings a little, you're not alone. It's the single most common confession we hear from occupational health and urgent care operators — and it's worth saying plainly, because almost no one does: most clinics are guessing at their prices. This isn't carelessness. Pricing has simply always been a black box. There's no Kelley Blue Book for a respirator fit test. No sticker on a pre-employment panel. You set a number years ago, maybe nudged it once during a slow quarter, and then you looked away and hoped.
The anxiety is the tell
Notice where the unease actually lives. It's not the rent or payroll — you can see those coming. It's the fees. You feel it when a national account asks for your rate sheet and you wonder if you just left money on the table by being too cheap, or torched the deal by being too high. You feel it when a competitor opens two exits down and you have no idea whether they're undercutting you or quietly charging 30% more and winning anyway.
That low-grade dread has a name in our world: pricing anxiety. And it's expensive in both directions.
Price too low and you bleed margin on volume — a DOT physical that's $20 under market, run 1,500 times a year, is $30,000 that simply evaporates. Nobody steals it. You give it away, one exam at a time, and it never shows up as a line on any report because the report only shows what you did collect, never what you could have.
Price too high on the wrong service and you don't find out at all. The employer just stops sending people. The phone is a little quieter. You blame the economy.
The cruelest part: these two failures can be happening in the same clinic, at the same time. Underpriced on your drug screens, overpriced on your audiograms, and no way to tell which is which. So you freeze. You leave everything exactly where it is, because changing a number you can't justify feels riskier than the slow leak you've learned to live with.
Why "just look it up" doesn't work
People assume this is a solved problem — surely you can search for the going rate? But occ-health pricing doesn't behave like that. A fee that's perfectly competitive in rural Texas is leaving real dollars on the table in metro California, because wages, overhead, and liability genuinely cost more there. A flat national average is worse than useless; it tells a Bakersfield clinic and a Manhattan clinic the exact same thing, and it's wrong for both.
What you actually need isn't a number. It's your number — every service you offer, benchmarked against real national rates, then adjusted to the cost geography you actually operate in. Line by line. In dollars. Defensible enough that when a skeptical employer pushes back, you can show your work.
That's the thing that's never existed. Until now.
Meet FeeAtlas
FeeAtlas is a one-time benchmark report built specifically for occupational health and urgent care clinics. You enter your location and your current fees for the most common services — DOT and CDL physicals, pre-employment exams, drug and alcohol screens, audiograms, spirometry, vaccines, the whole working catalog. A few minutes later, you get a report that tells you, for every single service:
What it's actually worth in your market — national reference rates, adjusted to your state's cost geography using the same family of indices Medicare relies on.
Where you stand — underpriced, at market, or above market, flagged at a glance.
The dollars — your real annual opportunity, summed up and broken out per service, so you know exactly which numbers to move and which to leave alone.
No software to install. No subscription. No consultant pulling a rate sheet out of thin air. One report, results in minutes, every benchmark line-item and defensible — so for the first time, the number you set isn't a number you have to look away from.
You've been pricing in the dark. Your competitors are too. FeeAtlas turns the lights on.
Today and Tomorrow (Tues, May 26) only Memorial Day Sale 30% off - promo code: mem30
Members get 20% off after that, get your coupon code here in the library
— Larry
🎓 Build the Provider Side of the Stack
The core provider actions, the Dashboard domains, and the clinical decision standards behind them are the curriculum of the OccMed Providers Course — and the working agenda of the twice-monthly Provider Office Hours.
If your providers are the ones making the calls that drive your employer outcomes, this is the program built for them.
New Vendor Member Spotlight: Data Dimensions
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📚 Member Library
Practice Briefs, surveillance program design, DOT compliance resources, and the full quality measurement framework live in the NAOHP Member Library.
🫂 2026 conference plans 👉 Submit Your Conference Preferences Here Now
What we’re hearing so far: Hundreds of providers have been going through our Occmed for Providers course, loved it so much now they’re asking for more advanced training - if this is you too, let us know in the preferences above or just respond here and “yes I want to learn more about [firefighter exams | joint injections | ultrasound | ???]
And a lot more interest on data, analytics, AI to make informed decisions.
Purpose Built Occupational Health EMR
🗓 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.
Recent Events:
🏭 Occupational Health Industry News & Signals
DOT finalizes Part 40 stopgap on observed collections — effective June 10
The U.S. Department of Transportation published a final rule on May 11 amending its drug and alcohol testing procedures under 49 CFR Part 40. Two things change. First, in any situation where an oral fluid test would normally be required but can't be performed — and right now none can, because there are currently no HHS-certified laboratories available to perform oral fluid testing — collectors must default to a directly observed urine collection. Second, the rule updates terminology to be consistent with Executive Order 14168, replacing "gender" with "sex" throughout the regulation. The rule is effective June 10, 2026, and affects every DOT-regulated employer, DER, and safety-sensitive employee across all six operating administrations — FAA, FMCSA, FRA, FTA, PHMSA, and USCG. NatLawReview + 2
What it means for you: Oral fluid is still on the books, but it isn't usable until HHS certifies two labs — and the framework stays in place until that happens. The practical effect for clinics doing DOT collections is that your same-sex direct-observation procedure and your collector documentation need to match the new language before June 10. If you run an in-house collection program, this is a quick policy and training update, not a workflow overhaul — but it's the kind of detail an auditor checks. Worth confirming your collectors know the observed-urine default and that your written policy reflects it. Willroth Consulting
Staying current on Part 40 is core to defensible DOT program quality. OccNation members trade audit-readiness checklists and policy language as these rules shift — the resource library is where the working documents live.
OSHA moves to drop the MSD recordkeeping column and the COVID-19 ETS
OSHA's 2026 deregulatory agenda includes two items occupational health programs should track. The agency is proposing to withdraw its proposal to add a musculoskeletal disorder column to the OSHA 300 Log, and separately is proposing to remove its COVID-19 Emergency Temporary Standard and the associated recordkeeping and reporting provisions. ALL4ALL4
What it means for you: Dropping the MSD column removes a reporting line, not the underlying problem. MSK cases are still the largest single driver of work comp cost and lost time, and the recordkeeping change does nothing to close the capability gap that sends so many of them out to orthopedic specialists. APPs and less-experienced physicians refer because they don't have the orthopedic depth to manage these cases confidently in the clinic — that's the real cost center, and it doesn't show up on any log. Less federal reporting pressure is a reason to build that competency on your own terms, not to let it slide.
That gap is precisely what the Virtual Ortho Calculator and our Upswing Health partnership are built to close — giving your providers a curbside orthopedic second opinion before a referral goes out the door. Run your numbers in the calculator and see what avoidable referrals are costing you.
OSHA's site-specific targeting keeps leaning on DART rates
OSHA's updated inspection-targeting directive continues to prioritize establishments by injury experience. The program focuses on establishments with high Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred (DART) rates, and those whose DART rates were trending upward. ALL4
Source: OSHA Directive CPL 02-01-067 (via ALL4 analysis)
What it means for you: Your employer clients' DART numbers are now an inspection trigger, and the single biggest lever on DART is how well injuries get managed once they walk in your door — early evaluation, appropriate modified duty, and getting people back to safe productive work instead of out on restriction. This is where a strong occupational health partner directly changes an employer's exposure. Restrictions should reflect the injury's functional limits and nothing else; the functional requirements of the job were set at hire. Clean, defensible return-to-work decisions keep DART honest and keep your clients off the targeting list.
Demonstrating that value to employers is what OccNation is for — the member community and resource library where program administrators trade the playbooks that actually move these numbers. Join the conversation in OccNation.