A Risk-Based Approach for Driving Excellence in Industrial Hygiene Program Management
How integrating software and management of change processes can improve chemical oversight, SEGs, exposure assessments, and sampling plans.
- By Greg Duncan, Kristi Hames
- May 01, 2025
The field of industrial hygiene (IH) is evolving. As Baby Boomers retire and long-held IH roles are increasingly being restructured, outsourced, or integrated into broader OH&S programs, many organizations are rethinking how they manage IH. One way organizations are navigating this changing landscape is by shifting from a compliance-focused strategy to a more risk-based approach. This approach is creating new opportunities for businesses to take a more proactive stance on exposure assessment and control while simultaneously helping to structure the IH program in a way that is more responsive to changing risks.
Let’s explore how a risk-based approach to IH, incorporating effective management of change (MOC) principles, can enhance core IH program functions such as chemical inventory management, defining and maintaining similar exposure groups (SEGs), qualitative exposure assessment (QEA), and sampling plan development. Along the way, we’ll also discuss how IH software can support the implementation of a risk-based approach, improving program performance and better protecting worker health.
Chemical Inventory Management
Many chemicals are subject to substance-specific exposure standards, and compliance with these standards has long been viewed as the benchmark for IH program performance. Unfortunately, this compliance-based approach often fails to fully recognize and control risks from chemicals that are not specifically regulated.
By contrast, a risk-based approach expands the scope of the IH program to assess the risks of all hazardous chemicals in the workplace. This might sound like a huge undertaking but having detailed, real-time visibility into workplace chemical inventory is a huge step toward ensuring that you’re identifying and controlling all chemical hazards. With a detailed understanding of your chemical inventory in hand, you can then apply MOC processes to ensure that chemical exposure risks are systematically evaluated as early as possible, implement appropriate exposure controls, and even restrict chemicals from your inventory to eliminate risks before workers are ever impacted.
Chemical management software allows users to centralize chemical inventory control and provide ready access to safety data sheet (SDS) information so that exposure risks can be reviewed and controlled as early as possible in the procurement and design processes. Chemical management software can even provide the ability to flag chemicals in your inventory based on selected health hazards, OELs, applicable regulatory requirements, and other criteria to automatically trigger exposure risk assessments and MOC approvals before those chemicals ever come through the door.
Defining & Maintaining Similar Exposure Groups (SEGs)
SEGs are a tried-and-true IH management tool based on the principle of grouping workers with similar exposure characteristics and monitoring a relatively small subset of those workers to extrapolate exposure risks across the entire SEG. Compared to individual worker monitoring, SEGs greatly help reduce sampling effort and costs. The challenge is that SEGs change over time as new exposure risk factors (e.g., chemicals, processes, equipment, controls, etc.) are introduced into the workplace, and failing to maintain your SEGs can leave workers exposed to uncontrolled risks.
A risk-based approach to managing SEGs that incorporates MOC processes helps ensure that changes in your chemical inventory, QEAs, and sampling plans (discussed in the next sections) prompt a review to confirm that SEGs are still properly defined and representative of actual exposure risks. You don’t want to introduce chemicals into the workplace only to realize after the fact that exposed workers are not enrolled in the appropriate SEG, that the exposure characteristics you use to define your SEGs have changed, and workers are not being protected.
IH software helps better define and maintain SEGs by allowing IH professionals to more closely assign and track SEG enrollment based on selected exposure risk factors. With the ability to easily reference data from your chemical inventory systems, QEA findings and sampling results, IH software enables more accurate characterization of exposure risks to ensure workers are enrolled in the right SEGs and that appropriate sampling plans and exposure controls are in place.
Qualitative Exposure Assessments (QEAs)
Like many other OH&S risk assessment types, the purpose of QEA is to evaluate exposure likelihood and health effect severity to ultimately calculate initial and residual exposure risk scores. In many ways, QEA forms the foundation for a risk-based approach to IH, helping IH professionals systematically characterize exposure risks so they can then define SEGs, develop sampling plans, and implement appropriate exposure controls.
You should periodically review your QEAs as exposure risks change, such as when you introduce new chemicals, processes, equipment, or controls to the workplace. You should apply MOC processes when reviewing QEAs to ensure that you’re incorporating any changes to chemical inventory, SEGs, and sampling plans into your updated QEAs. Similarly, changes to QEAs will likely impact how you define your corresponding SEGs and sampling plans, so having a systematic framework in place to evaluate and address these impacts is what MOC is all about.
IH software with QEA capabilities improves the standardization and centralization of your risk assessment processes to ensure exposure risks are evaluated consistently across SEGs, locations, and the entire organization. This enables an “apples-to-apples” comparison of exposure risks that facilitates data-driven decisions and effective communication of risks to management.
Developing Sampling Plans
Your sampling plan is essentially a detailed outline of what, where, and how sampling will occur. Key sampling plan considerations include:
- Applicable regulatory sampling requirements
- SEGs needing further monitoring and confirmation
- Sample types and quantities (frequency, OELs, sample media, etc.)
- Scheduling and deadlines for sampling activities
Under a compliance-based approach, sampling plans tend to remain static since they are primarily defined by prescriptive regulatory requirements. By contrast, a risk-based approach considers the changing nature of your chemical inventory, SEGs, and QEAs so that sampling plans can be periodically reviewed and refined, and IH professionals can better target their sampling activities where they are needed to address uncertainty around exposure risks.
Simultaneously, you should use your sampling results to confirm your SEG definitions and enrollment, verify QEA findings, and improve control selection and implementation. Once again, this review should apply MOC processes to ensure you are addressing how changes to your sampling plans can affect (and be affected by) other IH program functions.
IH software helps achieve greater efficiency in the documentation, scheduling, assignment and data collection activities of your IH sampling plan. This also enables clearer communication of your sampling activities to management and other stakeholders, making it easy to ensure sampling is performed according to plan and helping to demonstrate how IH sampling activities support compliance, reduce exposure risks, and protect worker health.
Leveraging Software for Risk-Based IH Program Management
Hopefully, the dynamic interplay that exists among your chemical inventory management process, SEGs, QEAs, and sampling plans is becoming apparent. Changes in one should ideally prompt review, update, and improvement of others. Within a risk-based approach, these otherwise separate IH functions begin to operate as integral components of a more holistic IH program. MOC processes provide the framework to manage them together rather than separately, making our IH programs more responsive and effective at addressing changing exposure risks.
IH software supports this risk-based approach by centralizing and standardizing these IH program management functions, simplifying complex data collection and analysis tasks, and facilitating clearer communication of IH program performance to ultimately improve IH program performance and help IH professionals effectively demonstrate the value of the IH program to the business.
This article originally appeared in the April/May 2025 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.