AI and EHS Use Cases: Potential for Severe Injuries and Fatalities (PSIF)

By Phil Molé, MPH

Welcome to the latest installment in our AI and EHS blog series! Here’s a recap of what we’ve covered so far:

• Post one — we provided a general overview of the topic, introducing it to EHS pros curious to learn more about the ways AI can support their life’s work of keeping people safe.
• Post two — we took a closer look at machine learning (ML) and its relevance to EHS professionals like you.
• Post three — discussed why AI offers a generational opportunity to improve EHS management, focusing on its ability to help quickly assess and control major safety risks.
• Post four — focused on why speed matters in EHS management, and how AI specifically delivers better risk insights, faster.

In this fifth post, we’ll shift to talk about specific use cases for AI in EHS management, focusing on how AI helps you to adopt and sustainably track one of the most impactful safety leading indicators – identification and control of potential for severe injury and fatalities (PSIF) risks.

Understanding Lagging and Leading Indicators

First, let’s start with a little background on lagging and leading indicators, and why the latter are essential to shifting toward a more proactive safety management approach.

What are Lagging Indicators?

The term lagging indicator (or lagging metric) refers to metrics that measure events that have already happened – i.e., they’re retroactive. Classic examples of lagging indicators are the total number of occupational injuries, or the total number of “recordable” injuries and illnesses based on OSHA Recordkeeping Standard definitions, or the recordable incident rate (RIR).

Lagging indicators are both useful and necessary, because we need to have documentation of the incidents that occurred so we can investigate them, identify root causes, and prevent recurrences. In fact, some tracking of lagging metrics is often a regulatory requirement for these reasons—it’s the reason why OSHA requires employers at establishments covered by the Recordkeeping Standard to complete a Form 301 for each recordable incident, and to post an annual summary of occupational injuries and illnesses.

Still, there’s a difference between lagging indicators being necessary and being sufficient. The major limitation of lagging indicators is baked right into their definition: The incidents, and therefore the behavior and choices that led to them, have already happened. We can learn from past incidents, but we can’t change them.

What are Leading Indicators?

Leading indicators

, or leading metrics, complement lagging metrics because they measure proactive actions that predict, and make possible, the better safety outcomes we want to see.

A real-world example might help here. Suppose your workplace is a warehousing and distribution center, and your OSHA logs show a significant number of injuries from trips and falls. The incident investigations indicate that these falls occur because walkways are often obstructed by tools, equipment and boxes.

One way to make future trips and falls less likely would be to develop a tailored inspection checklist to verify that walkways are unobstructed and then track the number of completed inspections as a leading metric. It’s a leading indicator because it’s not measuring a safety outcome directly, such as the number of falls, and instead is measuring an activity we have good reason to consider predictive of a reduction in falls. After all, the more we can verify that walkways don’t have slip/trip/fall hazards, the more we can expect a reduction in the rates of those incidents.

What Makes Leading Indicators Effective?

Use of leading indicators helps us to pivot from a reactive approach to safety management to a proactive approach, centered on prevention. Still, EHS professionals sometimes use the term “leading indicator” too broadly and believe that any metrics they consider leading indicators will help improve safety performance. The reality is that not all leading indicators are created equal.

OSHA has published guidance on leading indicators to help EHS professionals select and track leading indicators that will actually be effective. We can boil down OSHA’s suggestions to the SMART principles:

Specific: Does your leading indicator get into specifics for the action you will take to minimize hazards or improve a program area?

Measurable: Can you objectively measure the metric?

Accountable: Are you tracking a leading indicator relevant to your goals?

Reasonable: Is it possible to achieve the goals associated with your leading indicators?

Timely: Are you tracking leading indicators frequently enough to identify trends?

For example, you can see how our earlier example of the walkway inspection checklist, when deployed strategically, would meet all five SMART objectives. Completion of the checklist is objectively measurable, and it’s accountable, because it’s relevant to the goal of reducing slips/trips/falls. Doing and tracking the inspections is possible (“reasonable”) and you can make it timely based on the severity of the problem and how much activity there is in walkways—e.g., if there’s not much activity, a weekly inspection should suffice.

The main idea is that you should choose your leading indicators for their relevance to achieving your goals, because they track activities that make the achievement of the goals more likely. You need to also make sure you have ways of tracking the metrics accurately, and often enough to matter.

Identification of PSIF Risks is One of the Best Possible Leading Indicators

With that context, you can understand why identification and tracking of PSIF risks make for a great leading indicator and satisfies each of the SMART principles.

PSIF Tracking is “Specific”

In earlier posts in this series, we broke down the unpleasant reality that rates of severe injuries and fatalities have remained stubbornly flat over the last 20 years, even as rates of less significant injuries have dropped. This trend suggests there are many “hidden risks” in our workplace, and more proactive identification and control of those risks is needed to reduce rates of SIFs AI-enabled PSIF tracking enables you to take a specific action to improve your safety performance.

PSIF Tracking is “Measurable”

With the help of AI-enabled software, you can measure PSIF risks lurking within the incident report details for less severe incidents, including near misses/close calls.

PSIF Tracking is “Accountable”

PSIF tracking is clearly “accountable,” aka “relevant,” because there’s no more relevant safety goal than reducing incidence of SIFs. PSIF tracking matters because your people matter.

PSIF Tracking is “Reasonable”

If we take “doable” as a rough synonym for “reasonable,” we come up against what’s traditionally been one of the pain points for identifying and tracking PSIF risks: It’s been hard to do sustainably. That’s different now, though, because incident management software with AI-enabled PSIF detection makes the process much easier and more accurate than ever before.

PSIF Tracking is “Timely”

The same modern AI-powered PSIF tools that make PSIF detection easier also make it possible to do consistently. You’ll have the means to get the steady insights into PSIF risks you need.

Summing it all up, tracking PSIF risks helps you finally gather the insights you need to reduce risks of severe injuries and finally escape the reactive safety management cycle.

Looking for More Information on AI and EHS?

Stay tuned for future installments of our AI and EHS blog series, where you’ll learn more about AI, specific use cases for AI in EHS management, considerations when evaluating EHS software and vendors, and more!

In the meantime, you can visit our AI Glossary & Learning Hub to continue learning on your own. There, you’ll find a curated list of resources covering various aspects of AI and EHS, as well as definitions of common terms.

We also invite you to download and read our new white paper, “Why EHS Professionals Can’t Afford to Ignore AI.” You’ll get a deep dive into all of the reasons why EHS pros like you have a generational opportunity to use AI to pivot from a reactive safety management approach to a proactive approach that reduces injury rates and fosters a positive safety culture. From there, you can also get some guidance on what to look for when selecting an EHS software vendor with AI capabilities with our new AI vendor evaluation checklist.

Let VelocityEHS Help!

If you’re ready to jump to the part about how Velocity can help, we’re standing by to talk!

Our capabilities include AI PSIF Insights, and several AI-enabled enhancements. For example, AI is helping us improve root cause analysis, strengthen incident descriptions and JSA job task descriptions, and support better controls selection in ergonomics assessments and JSAs. It’s also enabling the auto-processing of contractor documents. And that’s just the beginning.

In fact, why not see for yourself how we can help? Get in touch today to set up a meeting so you can see our software in action!