Oregon SB 537 and the ISO 45001 Revision: What’s Changing and How OK Alone Helps You Get Ahead

Workplace safety rules rarely move fast, and then two move at once. This year, both Oregon and the international standards body behind ISO 45001 are updating the rules that govern how employers protect their people.

Both updates point in the same direction: safety programs need to prove they work, not just describe what they intend to do. Here is what is changing, and how OK Alone helps organizations get ahead of it.

Oregon extends workplace violence protections to home health and home hospice

Oregon OSHA is finalizing a new rule, OAR 437-002-0150, that builds on Senate Bill 537. The existing rule already required hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers to run workplace violence prevention programs. SB 537 extends that same coverage to home health and home hospice providers, whose employees work alone in a different home every day, often with little advance knowledge of who or what is on the other side of the door.

The timeline: public comment closed on August 31, 2026, the rule is on track for tentative adoption in October 2026, and it takes effect in January 2027. Employers newly in scope will need to run security assessments, build a documented violence prevention program, train staff annually, give workers a clear way to summon help, and keep records that a safety committee can review after an incident.

Home health is not a new sector for OK Alone. It was our very first customer type back in 2013, and a lot of what we have built since maps directly onto what this rule is asking for:

• Discreet Alerts and the Panic/Help Button give a worker a way to call for help with a shake, a back-tap, or a button press, without escalating a tense situation in the moment.

• Custom Alert Zones let an agency flag a known high-risk address so any worker approaching it gets a warning before they knock, turning a one-time risk assessment into something the whole team benefits from on every visit.

• High-Risk Check-Ins and Timed Activity let a supervisor tighten the check-in cadence for a specific visit once it has been flagged as higher risk.

• Worker Down detection covers the moment a worker cannot summon help themselves, which a panic button alone does not solve.

• 24/7 Safety Monitoring gives after-hours and weekend visits, common in home hospice, a monitored escalation path without an agency staffing its own around-the-clock desk.

• SMC logs, Worker Actions, and Reports build the record a safety committee or inspector would want to see: who was alerted, when, and how it was resolved.

None of this is a substitute for your own legal read of the final rule, which is still pending adoption. What it does give you is a system already built for the exact situation this rule is written for: a worker alone, at an address the employer does not fully control, who needs a fast and documented way to get help.

ISO 45001 is shifting from paperwork to proof

Separately, ISO's technical committee has been revising ISO 45001, the international standard for occupational health and safety management systems. The Draft International Standard ballot ran for 12 weeks and closed on September 9, 2026, according to ISO's own project record. Member votes are now being tallied, and the draft will either go back to committee, face another DIS round, or move forward to Final Draft International Standard, with the updated standard expected to publish as ISO 45001:2027 in the first half of 2027. The revision broadens the standard's focus well beyond physical hazards. Psychosocial risk, workplace culture, and demonstrable wellbeing outcomes are now part of the picture, alongside newer additions like climate-related risk and hybrid work.

The direction of travel is consistent: certification bodies will expect employers to show that safety and wellbeing controls actually operate day to day, not just that a policy exists on paper.

This is where OK Alone's audit trail becomes the most useful part of the platform, not just the alerting.

• Team Broadcast, SMC logs, and Alert Zone Intelligence notifications are all exportable, timestamped records of who was warned about what, when, and whether they acknowledged it. That is the kind of evidence an auditor working from an outcomes-based standard wants to see.

• Alert Zone Intelligence shifts safety from reactive, waiting for a missed check-in or a panic alert, to proactive, giving workers advance notice of weather, verified incidents, and known hazards before they walk into them.

• Worker Stats Reports give safety teams the ongoing usage and incident data that feeds a management review, one of the core mechanics any ISO 45001 certification depends on.

As with the Oregon rule, whether specific evidence satisfies a specific auditor's checklist is a conversation for your certification body. What OK Alone offers is the record-keeping that makes that conversation easier to have.

The common thread

Both changes ask the same underlying question: can you show that your safety program actually works for the people it is meant to protect? For a lone worker, home health provider or otherwise, that answer starts with a fast way to get help and a system that logs exactly what happened when they needed it. That is the part of the job OK Alone has been built around since day one.

Sources: Oregon OSHA (osha.oregon.gov), ISO (iso.org/standard/89698.html), ISO/TC 283 (committee.iso.org).