Safety incident reporting, by text

Why near-misses go unlogged

The OSHA-300 / OSHA-301 paper-trail gap on commercial projects isn’t intent — it’s friction. A foreman sees a hard hat fall from scaffolding to an empty walkway below. Nobody was hit. The foreman tells the super at the next walk-down. The super tells the PM at the project meeting. The PM tells the safety officer next week. Nobody logs the near-miss.

Forward removes the friction. Foreman texts the incident directly. Forward drafts the OSHA-format record, attaches any photos, queues it for safety-officer + PM approval. Approval click → posted record. Total time from incident to posted draft: under 30 seconds.

What Forward captures from a safety text

The bot parses the foreman’s text for:

• Incident type. Slip/trip, struck-by, struck-against, caught-in/between, fall-from-elevation, electric-shock, lifting-injury, exposure, near-miss, etc.
• Severity. Recordable (first-aid level), medical-attention, lost-time, restricted-duty, fatality (escalation-only).
• Location. Building, floor, room, grid.
• Trade involved.
• Outcome. Person treated on-site, transported, no injury.
• Witnesses. If the foreman names anyone.
• Photos. Any attached MMS media.

Sample exchange

Foreman: near miss — hard hat fell from scaffolding scaffold 3
         east elevation, third floor, into walkway below.
         walkway was empty. picked it up immediately.
         [photo of scaffolding section]

Forward: Drafted safety incident #017.
  Type:        Near-miss (falling object)
  Severity:    Near-miss (no injury)
  Location:    Scaffold 3, east elevation, Floor 3
  Outcome:     No injury — walkway empty
  Photo:       Attached (1 image)
  Status:      Queued for safety officer + PM approval

The approval queue + escalation

Every drafted safety incident lands in the Forward dashboard approval queue. Approvers can edit the type / severity / narrative, then approve to post into Procore’s safety log (or wherever your safety system of record lives). Forward’s approval queue supports multi-step routing — e.g., safety officer signs off first, then PM, then sub PE if dollar-figure thresholds trigger it.

Fatal incidents are flagged for IMMEDIATE escalation: the bot sends a separate alert message to the platform admin emails in the tenant config, in addition to the normal approval queue.

The audit chain (for OSHA)

OSHA investigators care about timestamps and provenance. The Forward log gives them both: the verbatim field text, the timestamp of capture, the photo URLs, the drafted record, the approval click, the posted-to-Procore record ID, all in one export.

For multi-employer worksites, the log also captures which sub the foreman represents (via field-user enrollment) so OSHA responsibility doesn’t end up unattributed.

How to try it

Text +1 (682) 300-6750 with a safety incident. The live demo will draft an OSHA-style record and show the queue-and-route flow.

Drop your email above to pilot on a real project with your safety officer in the loop.