Incidents: reporting, root cause, and pattern context

What this covers

An incident is any injury, near miss, property damage, chemical exposure, or vehicle accident that happens on a job. Verinode gives you one place to log it fast, one place to work through why it happened, and one place to see whether it fits a pattern with your other incidents, all feeding a clean OSHA record without a separate spreadsheet or binder.

Verinode does not decide how you classify or resolve an incident. It gives you a fast form to get it on record, a structured place to think through root cause and a fix, and the surrounding context (your last 90 days, your most recent similar incident) so the decision is informed. You call the severity, you write the root cause, you close the loop.

Where to find it

Open Safety from the sidebar at iq.verinode.ai/safety. The page opens with your safety standing at the top (days without a recordable, training compliance, cert wall and insurance renewals due), then a Take Action row of launch tiles, then an Explore row of benchmarks and pattern tiles, then the record list itself.

Two tiles in the Take Action row matter for incidents:

• Report an incident, the tile covered in this article. Click it to open the Safety launch deck.
• Corrective Actions, a separate launch deck that sits over the same incident records and is where you set a fix and a due date, or mark one done. It is covered in its own article; this one focuses on logging the incident and reading its detail card.

Every logged incident also appears in the record list further down the page, alongside your certifications, policies, and insurance (COIs). Click any incident row there to open its detail card, the second half of this article.

Logging an incident: the Safety launch deck

Clicking Report an incident opens the Safety launch deck, a slide-over panel with three tabs.

Overview tab

The Overview tab sells the habit before you have any data in it. It reads "Log every incident and near-miss. A clean OSHA record and a safer crew. It takes under a minute," alongside an example standing card (a sample safety score, days without a recordable, training currency, and open corrective actions) captioned "Example standing. Yours builds as you log incidents and training." so it is clear the numbers shown are illustrative, not yours.

Empty state. Until you have logged anything, the Overview tab reads "Your safety record once you start," with two placeholder lines: "Days without a recordable" and "Open corrective actions and your OSHA log."

Open items tab

The Open items tab lists every incident that is not yet Closed, with a count badge on the tab itself. Each row shows the incident type (Injury, Near Miss, Property Damage, Chemical Exposure, or Vehicle Accident) on the left, and its current status (Open, Investigating, or Corrective Action) plus the incident date on the right. This tab has no content, and is not shown with a badge, once every incident on file is Closed.

Report an incident tab

This is the form itself. It reads "Log what happened. Recordables and corrective actions track here and feed your OSHA log," then asks for:

1. 1Incident date. Defaults to today; change it if you are logging something after the fact.
2. 2Incident type. A dropdown of Injury, Near Miss, Property Damage, Chemical Exposure, or Vehicle Accident. It defaults to Near Miss, since near misses are the events most likely to get skipped if the form defaults to something more serious-sounding.
3. 3Severity. A dropdown of First Aid, Recordable, Lost Time, or Fatality. It defaults to First Aid. See the severity section below for what each level means.
4. 4What happened? A free-text description. This is the only required field, the Log the incident button stays disabled until you have typed something here.
5. 5Click Log the incident. On success the form clears and replaces itself with "Logged. Track corrective action under Open items." If the save fails, an inline error appears above the button instead ("Could not log the incident." or the specific error).

That is intentionally all the form asks for. Location, who was involved, a linked job, root cause, and a corrective action all have a home, they live on the incident's detail card once it exists, described below, and the corrective action itself is set from the separate Corrective Actions launch deck, not from this quick-report form.

The incident detail card

Once an incident is logged, clicking its row in the Safety record list opens its detail card. The eyebrow reads Incident, next to a stance pill (Healthy, Drift, Exposed, Breaching, or Watching) that tells you at a glance whether this incident needs attention:

• Healthy once it is Closed with its corrective action closed out. Verinode's follow-up prompt at that point is to review it for learning value with the crew, not to file it away silently.
• Drift when it is Open with no corrective action yet, or First Aid with no root cause. First-aid events that get a root-cause pass are far less likely to recur as a full recordable; the ones that skip it tend to repeat.
• Exposed when a Recordable or Lost Time incident is still open with an unclosed corrective action. Every day it stays open compounds the EMR (experience modification rate) impact, since EMR runs on a rolling three-year average.
• Breaching when severity is Fatality, or when a corrective action due date has passed. An overdue corrective action is one of the biggest drivers behind an OSHA citation escalating.
• Watching for a First Aid incident with nothing else flagged, an honest "nothing to act on yet" rather than a false all-clear.

Four stats sit under the title:

• Severity, the level you selected (First Aid, Recordable, Lost Time, or Fatality).
• Recordable, Yes or No, reflecting whether this incident is marked OSHA-recordable.
• Corrective Action, showing "Closed" once closed, a countdown like "5d to close" while a due date is set and still ahead, "3d overdue" once it has passed, or "No due date" if none is set yet.
• Logged, the incident date.

Below the stats, the card breaks into three sections.

What Happened

The plain narrative: your description, the Location if you gave one, People Involved if any were named, and the Linked Job (claim number and client) if this incident is tied to a specific job. Any of these that were not captured simply do not appear, there is no blank row for a field you left out.

Root Cause & Preventive Change

This is the 5-Why section: work backward from what happened to why it actually happened, then write down the fix.

• Root Cause (5-Why). If nothing has been recorded, the card reads that no root cause is on file yet, and that the fastest way to prevent a repeat is a 5-Why pass (asking "why" repeatedly until you reach the actual cause instead of stopping at the surface symptom). Once you have written one, it displays here in full.
• Corrective Action. If nothing is set, the card notes that no corrective action is documented and that assigning one with a due date is what closes the loop. Corrective actions are set from the separate Corrective Actions launch deck (the "Set a corrective action" tile), which writes back to this same incident, not from this detail card directly.
• CA Due. Once a due date is set, it shows here, along with the close date if the action has since been marked done.

Pattern Context

This section only appears when there is something to compare against, either at least one OSHA recordable in the trailing 90 days, or a prior incident of the same type on file. When it shows, it reads how many OSHA recordables have happened in the last 90 days, and, if there is a prior incident of the same type (say, a second Vehicle Accident), the date and severity of the most recent one before this. That is the pattern check: is this a one-off, or the second time this exact thing has happened.

For how your incident rate compares to peer operators rather than to your own history, see reading a benchmark and how benchmarks work, Safety's peer comparison covers incident rate per 100,000 hours worked, training compliance, days since last recordable, and policy review currency, viewable at national or state scope.

Two more tabs can appear below these, only when there is something in them:

• Open Tips, near-term suggestions Verinode has surfaced for this specific incident, each with its own headline, rationale, and recommended next step.
• Findings, any decisions elsewhere in Verinode that were linked back to this incident, each showing its title and its monthly cost of inaction where one has been sized.

OSHA-recordable severity, in plain terms

The four severity levels track the standard OSHA distinctions:

• First Aid. Minor, treated on-site: a bandage, ice, over-the-counter medication. Not OSHA-recordable on its own.
• Recordable. Needed medical treatment beyond first aid, or resulted in restricted work or a job transfer. This is the level that lands on your OSHA log.
• Lost Time. The employee missed one or more full work days. A lost-time day compounds directly, replacement labor, supervisor time re-covering the work, and the productivity drag of a crew running short.
• Fatality. A death resulting from the incident. This triggers mandatory OSHA notification on a strict clock, and Verinode marks it Breaching immediately.

Whether an incident is marked OSHA-recordable is a separate flag from severity, since a Property Damage or Vehicle Accident incident can be serious without being a recordable injury. Your recordable count and days-since-last-recordable streak feed the safety standing shown on the Safety Overview tab and the hero band at the top of the Safety page.

Encrypted writes

The fields most likely to contain a name, a location, or a description of exactly what happened, description, root cause, corrective action, people involved, and location, are encrypted at rest under a vault key scoped to your account, not stored as plain text in the database. That protection is part of the same standard applied across every operator-facing surface at Verinode: your data is never sold to carriers, and it is not something a Verinode employee can casually browse or export. Verinode is built as an independent data trust, not a tool that trades in your operational detail.

Best-practice example

A tech reports a near miss: a ladder shifted on wet grass, nobody was hurt. Logged in under a minute as Near Miss, First Aid severity, with a short description. A week later a second near miss comes in on a different job, same root cause (ladder feet on wet grass, no stabilizer used). The Pattern Context section on the second incident's detail card surfaces that prior similar incident automatically. That is the cue to stop treating each one as a one-off: write a real 5-Why on the second incident (why was the ladder unstabilized, why isn't a stabilizer standard kit), set a corrective action ("Add ladder stabilizers to every van's standard kit") with a due date from the Corrective Actions deck, and close the loop before a third near miss becomes something worse.

Data sources