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Separate Investigations into a Distinct Section for Enhanced EHS Management

Related products: Inspections

Idea Overview: The proposal is to create a dedicated section for Investigations within the SafetyCulture platform. Currently, all events are reported as Issues, which are then transformed into inspections, such as the "Accident Investigation Report (AIR)" template. However, this approach leads to certain challenges, including bypassing the notification process for senior leadership and potential disconnects between incidents and investigations.

Problem Statement:

  1. Notification Breakdown: The current process of initiating investigations through templates causes a breakdown in the notification system to senior leadership, as users can start investigations without triggering necessary escalations.
  2. Support and Integration: Users initiating investigations from templates may miss out on required support from the Health and Safety (H&S) team. Additionally, retrospective linking of investigations to the original Issue becomes problematic, leading to a suboptimal user experience.

Solution Proposal: Separate Investigations from Inspections to address these issues and enhance the platform's capabilities. The new Investigation section would have distinct functionalities tailored to the investigative process:

  1. User Allocation and Reminders:

    • Assign users to specific sections within investigations.
    • Set criteria-based reminders for overdue tasks.

  2. Sequential Progression:

    • Prevent users from advancing to subsequent pages unless previous reviews and sign-offs have been completed.

  3. Conditional Logic for Confidentiality:

    • Incorporate the ability to show/hide questions based on legal privilege or GDPR sensitivity.

  4. Hierarchical Sign-off Levels:

    • Implement multi-level sign-off options based on required authorization levels.

  5. Enhanced Logic Implementation:

    • Extend logic capabilities beyond immediate sections, allowing dynamic question display/hiding throughout the template.

Benefits:

  1. Improved Notification Flow: The separation of Investigations ensures that senior leadership is consistently notified, avoiding any bypasses in the escalation process.
  2. Comprehensive Support: Initiators of investigations receive the necessary support from the H&S team, enhancing incident resolution.
  3. Enhanced User Experience: The ability to link investigations back to their corresponding Issues creates a seamless and user-friendly experience.
  4. EHS Platform Advancement: This proposed feature positions SafetyCulture as a comprehensive EHS solution, potentially attracting a broader user base.

Market Alignment: The proposed changes align SafetyCulture with other established EHS solutions like EcoOnline, Sphera, and Velocity. By offering a turnkey EHS platform, SafetyCulture could capture a larger share of the market and potentially increase its user base.

Conclusion: The creation of a dedicated Investigations section within SafetyCulture's platform, with its distinctive features tailored to the investigative process, addresses the current challenges and positions SafetyCulture as a leading EHS solution. This enhancement would not only resolve existing issues but also attract new users seeking an all-in-one EHS platform.

 

You’ve put a different design thought into this than I have, but we have similar problems as we transition hazard, near miss, and accident reporting to SafetyCulture.  We too are struggling between various inspection templates and Issues.

My idea to solve for our company:

  1. Improve submission of Issues (soon to be Incidents) with things such as requiring site, by category requiring pictures, within categories by question requiring certain ones, and more.
  2. Allow the new Analytics the ability to chart Issues by the questions within each category (which might be things like who was injured, what room, what equipment was involved, was an immediate corrective action put in place, etc.).
  3. Add access to Issues timeline data feed (chat and questions’ answers) to the Exporter tool and Power BI connector.
  4. Add the ability to link Inspections to Issues, but rather than just adding the Inspection, have the question answers, title, description, category, and other fields from the Issue automatically populate data in the inspection you start from the Issue. 

The reason I’m looking at this approach is we are having an internal debate on the following:

  • How should we classify hazards simply observed (safety hazard observation), hazards where someone almost got hurt (near miss), and accidents (first aid or more was required)?
  • How should we capture the information at the moment it happens to ensure it is not lost or translated incorrectly later (inspection template, Issue, paper, phone call to management)?
    • We have to understand that when it happens there will be little known, and reporting needs to be fast - who was injured, what might be injured, equipment involved, what they were doing before and during, and eyewitnesses.
    • We have to consider HIPAA laws. If reported electronically, do we need to quickly archive the record so other employees/shifts can’t see it (it is just the basic info at that point)?
  • How do we notify site management and the corporate safety team of incidents?
    • Depending on the type and severity of incidents, the corporate safety team may not always need to be aware. Most of the time, the site management team should always be made aware.
    • For the “on the fly” as it happens basic info, if we rely on paper or phone calls, the correct people may not always be informed. If we use “Issues” we can better automate notifications. If we use an Inspection template, we can use a question to trigger notifications, but it’s more limited.
  • Who will do the investigation after the accident’s basic info was reported and who needs to see it?
    • Most of the time, our Office Managers will be doing the details investigation. In some cases, it is a plant manager, production manager, or someone else. We have people with user accounts that may only exist for accident reporting.
    • We have templates setup with only access by those specific people, and the reports only share to those people and the corporate safety team for HIPAA reasons.
  • How should we transfer the basic “on the fly” information to the investigative report?
    • For now, sites are left to capture the “on the fly” info however they want. They have to transfer that to an Inspection template manually.
    • There is a lot of additional investigation that occurs for improvement, corrective action, discipline, and insurance purposes - address of employee, SSN, work hours, training, employment length, job role, state of mind/sleep, etc.
  • How do we get the information to our insurance carrier for Worker’s Compensation claims?
    • We can submit claims through a phone call, using their form emailed, emailing our own report, or through and EDI automated process. 
    • For now, our template is setup to capture duplicate information so we can format it exactly how the insurance carrier wants it depending on the method the site will use to report the accident to them.

We are only exploring Issues at a couple sites because of the limitations the feature has. Because we are requiring the template for accident reporting, we’re now left with a large, inconsistent gap. For us, I think those 4 simple changes above would allow us to overcome most of these debates.  Not to say your ideas would not also have additional value for us.

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