Save the Date — 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.
Registration opens soon. Watch this newsletter for pricing, speakers, and early-bird details. Mark September 17–18 on your calendar now.
Showing the Work: What This Summer's Engagements Are Already Teaching Us
We've got three consulting engagements moving at once right now. Two are health-system occupational health assessments. One is a market study for a group looking at entering the field. Here's what the data has surfaced so far — free, because these lessons apply to almost every program reading this.
The number nobody can find is their own.
At two different health systems this year, occupational health, employee health, and workers' comp all sit under a single budget line. Both directors told us the same thing in different words: there's no way to see what occupational health actually earns. One estimated her program is "probably operating at a loss" — then admitted she couldn't prove it either way. OH revenue quietly subsidizes employee health, but because the ledger is blended, the subsidy is invisible and the program takes the blame for costs it doesn't own. This is the single most common finding we see. If your OH, EH, and WC dollars share one budget line, you're almost certainly flying blind on margin. Pulling those three apart is the first thing our Executive Diagnostic does.
→ [See what the Executive Diagnostic reveals about your program]
You can bill real volume and still be one vacancy from a leak.
One program billed north of a third of a million dollars in occupational health charges last year — and the entire revenue cycle runs through one person. The director does all the billing herself, the dedicated billing seat has sat open for months, and a batch of electronic claims recently had to be re-uploaded after a filing issue. The reports exist — revenue trends, aged A/R, monthly financials. What's thin is the staffing and the second set of eyes. A program can price well, bill real volume, and still sit one vacancy away from money slipping through at the collection step. The first step to filling that seat is knowing what it should pay.
→ [Benchmark the role with the Staff Comp Benchmark]
Pricing discipline is rarer than it should be — and it's learnable.
That same program does one thing most don't: every July they secret-shop every competitor in the market — DOT exams, physicals, drug screens — and reset their prices against what they find. That's exactly right. A stale fee schedule is one of the easiest dollars in occupational health to leave on the table, and most programs haven't touched theirs in years. If you haven't checked yours against the market lately, that's what FeeAtlas is for.
→ [Check your fees against the market with FeeAtlas]
The provider cliff is real.
At one system, the medical director retires at year-end. The board-certified replacement they'd recruited didn't work out and left. They rated their own succession readiness a one out of five. This is the field's problem more than theirs — occupational medicine's pipeline is thin, and a single retirement can put a stable, growing program at risk overnight. When you do backfill, often with an APP or a physician new to occ med, getting them to real occupational-medicine competence is what separates coverage from capability.
→ [Get your next provider occ-med-ready with the OccMed Providers Course]
Sizing a new market means finding where the specialized work is.
The third engagement is a market study for a group evaluating an occupational health opportunity across a cluster of counties near a major metro. What makes it worth watching is the focus: public-sector and safety-sensitive workers — police, fire, EMS, transit, public works, corrections. That workforce is the opposite of commodity. These are the encounters that demand real clinical expertise and carry real value: fitness-for-duty, firefighter physicals, DOT and CDL certifications, psychological evaluations, respirator clearance, ongoing surveillance. Higher acuity, higher reimbursement, and a recurring cycle a walk-in clinic can't serve well. That same concentration of public-sector and safety-sensitive employment almost certainly exists somewhere in your market — you just may not have mapped it. We're using the Market Analyzer to surface it sector by sector from public labor data, tuned for this engagement to isolate the public-administration and safety-sensitive workforce instead of a generic employer count. Full results are still coming in, but the method is one any program can run. If you want to know where the high-value, specialized work sits in your own backyard, that's what a focused Analyzer run answers.
→ [Find the specialized workforce in your market with the Market Analyzer]
Most of this surfaced before we ever walked in the door — out of a structured intake and the numbers a program already has. The work isn't finding exotic problems. It's making the ones already in your ledger visible enough to act on.
—Larry
Larry Earl, MD, President, NAOHP
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
🗓 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.
Recent Events:
🏭 Occupational Health Industry News & Signals
OSHA moves to drop the medical-evaluation requirement for the most common respirators.
As part of its 2026 deregulatory push, OSHA has proposed removing the medical-evaluation requirement in the Respiratory Protection Standard for certain respirators — specifically filtering facepiece respirators and loose-fitting powered air-purifying respirators. That's the N95 family plus loose-fitting PAPRs — the respirators most of your employer clients actually use. The proposal is out for comment and still working through rulemaking; it isn't final.
Source: [Federal Register, OSHA Docket OSHA-2025-0006] Occupational Safety and Health Administration
What it means for you: Respirator medical clearance is a routine, recurring line in most occupational health programs. If this goes final, employers whose workers wear only N95s or loose-fitting PAPRs may no longer be required to send them for evaluation — which touches both a revenue line you count on and a clinical safeguard many of you still believe in. Now is the time to understand the proposal, weigh in during the comment window if you have a position, and think through how you'd counsel employer clients on keeping clearances in place voluntarily where they make clinical sense.
Respirator clearance is core clinical territory in the OccMed Providers Course — the place to get your providers current on what the standard requires and what's changing. → [Explore the OccMed Providers Course]
Still no oral-fluid labs — and the urine-testing lab pool just got smaller.
In a Federal Register notice dated July 2, 2026, SAMHSA confirmed there are still no HHS-certified laboratories for oral-fluid testing, and listed LabCorp facilities voluntarily withdrawing from the National Laboratory Certification Program effective June 30, 2026. Oral fluid has been authorized on paper since 2023 but remains legally unusable until at least two labs are certified — and that hasn't happened.
Source: [Federal Register, SAMHSA, July 2, 2026] Federal Register
What it means for you: If you do DOT collections, urine is still the only usable method, and the certified-lab network you rely on is contracting rather than growing. Don't build your program around oral fluid yet. Confirm your lab remains certified, keep your same-sex observed-collection procedure current under the June 10 Part 40 changes, and make sure your collectors aren't training on a method they can't legally perform.
Compare notes with other programs working through the same lab-certification churn in OccNation. → [Talk it through in OccNation]
Workers' comp severity is climbing — and where care starts is driving it.
NCCI's 2026 State of the Line reported medical claim severity up about 4% for 2025, with the average lost-time medical claim around $30,600, and noted that utilization — particularly inpatient services — has become a more prominent cost driver. Frequency keeps falling while severity rises. And in its symposium sessions, NCCI noted that starting care at a nonhospital provider typically means far lower medical utilization.
Source: [NCCI 2026 State of the Line] GenreCutcompcosts
What it means for you: This is the economic case for occupational health, stated in someone else's data. The point of entry sets the cost curve for the whole claim. When an injured worker starts with an occupational medicine clinician who has the depth to manage the case — including the orthopedic depth to keep appropriate MSK care in-house instead of routing it out — utilization, duration, and cost all come down. That capability is what employers are actually buying.
See what avoidable referrals and downstream utilization are costing your employer clients. → [Run the numbers with the Virtual Ortho program]