Data-Driven Insights Advance Workplace Injury Prevention Efforts

Employers in industries with musculoskeletal disorder (MSDs) risks have typically relied on lagging indicators – information gathered after an incident occurs – to develop injury prevention strategies. Now, with an investment in wearable technology, ergonomic solutions, workplace health management monitoring systems, and employee education, employers can respond in real time to help prevent these injuries.

During a recent WorkCare webinar, At the Intersection of the Digital and Physical in Workplace Health Management, Bryan Reich of WorkCare and Sam Thomas with Ideagen Reactec, discussed ways that digital technology, discussed ways that digital technology makes it possible for occupational health and safety professionals to use both leading and lagging indicators to drive changes that boost productivity and reduce medical costs, workers’ compensation claims, and OSHA-recordable incident rates. indicators to drive changes that boost productivity and reduce medical costs, workers’ compensation claims, and OSHA-recordable incident rates.

Considering his 20-plus years of experience in the field, Thomas, sales director at Ideagen Reactec, said he has seen a “real explosion of tech and its adoption within the health and safety space in the past five to six years.” Growing interest in data-driven solutions has created opportunities for Ideagen Reactec, which produces personal protective equipment, wearable devices, and data management systems, to collaborate with WorkCare and employers across multiple industry sectors.

Why Digital and Physical Alignment Makes Sense

Work-related MSDs cost employers billions of dollars a year in direct and indirect costs. For employees, persistent musculoskeletal pain diminishes quality of life on and off the job, affecting physical and mental health and potentially leading to reliance on drugs and other substances for relief. Employers are looking for ways to reduce these costs and increase employe engagement in safe work practices.

“We know a lot of traditional ergonomic programs still tend to be reactive, and I believe that when you’re only reactive instead of preventative, you’re missing those employees who are not going to show up in a traditional assessment,” Reich said. “We also know that experienced employees tend to find natural ergonomic shortcuts or the easy way to perform an activity.”

In addition, he noted, when responsibility for an ergonomic program falls within the domain of a workplace safety professional who lacks related training and experience, ergonomics may only be considered as part of a post-incident safety investigation. When combined, these factors can increase injury risk and create a demand for more progressive approaches.

While traditional observational assessments, such as REBA and RULA, provide useful snapshots, they involve a degree of subjectivity and lack the precision a data-driven approach can provide. (Rapid Entire Body Assessments and Rapid Upper Limb Assessments are used to identify and score a worker’s MSD risk by observing posture, movement, material handling, and similar functions.)

“You can do a snapshot study of a person on a given day and think, ‘We’re within acceptable limits here. We’re not going to extreme percentages when we talk about those body motions.’ But a whole risk assessment that is based on a single snapshot does not accurately represent other employees who are on the same production line, working at different rates and using different techniques with different postures,” Thomas said.

Transitioning from Reactive to Proactive MSD Management

To improve a company’s occupational health and safety performance, employers are advised to leverage technological tools to track and analyze leading and lagging indicators. This includes the use of wearable technology to continuously monitor workers and produce high-quality, actionable data.

Commonly used wearable devices, such as smart watches, use sensors that alert wearers when they move from a green or yellow zone to a red-risk zone. When previously hidden injury risks and correlations in patterns become clearly apparent, it becomes possible for individual workers and organizations to make injury prevention adjustments in real time.

“This technology is an added resource for the safety team,” Thomas said. “It can autonomously perform workplace monitoring with very little input, deliver data sets, and translate findings in a way that’s easy to understand, accessible, and can be cascaded out to operations, maintenance, and other divisions of the organization.”

For instance, Ideagen Reactec clients can refer to data to inform strategies for staffing, reasonable workload expectations, job rotation options, or acceptable risk levels. WorkCare industrial injury prevention specialists can use the data when making recommendations on ergonomic adjustments or coaching employees. Employees armed with information about overexertion and other injury exposure risks can make their own adjustments while remaining productive.

In one case, on-site WorkCare specialists leveraged actionable data to identify exposure risks and develop preventive interventions in an aerospace manufacturing facility. As a result, OSHA-recordable MSDs fell by about 54%, lowering the company’s overall OSHA-recordability rate by 72% and demonstrating the significant impacting MSDs were having across the organization.

The Bottom Line on Wearable Technology in the Workplace

When introducing wearable technology in a workplace, Ideagen Reactec recommends creating a data hierarchy to facilitate monitoring across work groups, with members who might be assigned based on production areas, job roles, or dedicated teams.

“Having that level of categorization allows you to see the wood through the trees and quickly highlight an area in need of attention like, ‘It’s line one in manufacturing.’  There’s no use just collecting data for data’s sake, Thomas said. “It needs to be actionable. It needs to be understood, and it needs to be something that you can easily embed into an organization as part of a change management process.”

What’s your bottom line? At WorkCare, we want to hear about your workplace health management challenges and goals. Based on our years of experience, and with an understanding of your specific needs, we are confident we can make a measurable difference. Contact us today.