Occupational Data for Health | NIOSH

Occupational Data for Health (ODH) is a way to standardize work information in electronic health records (EHRs). It can help individual clinicians and healthcare organizations to better recognize, treat, and prevent work-related health conditions. Implementing ODH will also provide public health departments with valuable information that they can use to improve public health. Learn more about how ODH can improve patients’ healthcare and public health.

On average, U.S. workers spend close to half their waking hours at work where they can encounter a wide range of hazards that can have a profound impact on their health. What we do for work also affects our health outside of work in many ways. These include take-home issues such as work-related stress and what we can afford to spend on items such as where we live, what we eat, recreation, and health care. Having patient work information readily available in EHRs will make it possible to better recognize relationships between work and health problems in individuals and populations.

Clinicians and healthcare organizations can use patient work information to improve patient care and, together with public health organizations, to improve public health. However, EHRs rarely contain standardized work information that can be used digitally to help clinicians care for patients and are interoperable with other information technology systems. Interoperability makes information easier to share across systems, such as with those used by public health departments. To solve this problem, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) worked with partners to develop ODH–an informatics solution to standardize work information collected in EHRs to improve patients’ healthcare and public health.