How to Use Intelex’s HECA App to Reduce Serious Injuries and Fatalities (SIFs)

6 minute read

If someone asked you right now to rate how safe your jobsite is, it would be tough to give a clear answer.

With traditional measures like total recordable injury rate (TRIR), you’d have to wait until the job is finished. Then you’d count the injuries that meet the recordability threshold, divide by total hours worked, and adjust by a set number like 200,000 or a million.

Dr. Matthew Hallowell, CEO of Safety Function, presented this scenario in a recent live session. “It’s pretty ridiculous when you think about it,” he said. “I have no way of measuring safety in the present tense. I can only do it in past tense.”

This gap is at the crux of Hallowell’s recent peer-reviewed research, which demonstrates that reducing TRIR does almost nothing to prevent serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs). In fact, while TRIR has declined steadily for decades, SIF rates have remained flat.

According to Hallowell, companies can close this gap by measuring and monitoring safety differently — not by focusing on injury counts after the fact, but on whether the hazards that actually kill people are controlled right now, in the field, before anyone gets hurt.

Two frameworks make this operational:

• High Energy Control Assessment (HECA): A leading metric defined as the proportion of high-energy hazards with a corresponding direct control. It’s completed in the moment, during the safety walks and site visits organizations already perform.
• Safety Classification and Learning (SCL): A framework that standardizes how safety events are classified using a consistent set of questions about energy and controls. It connects leading and lagging indicators and enables organizational learning.

Intelex has partnered with Safety Function to build the industry’s first HECA application, true to the science, with a singular goal: eliminating death in the workplace by managing energy directly.

Here is how the HECA app works on the job site.

Step one: The field assessment

Assessments are done at the point of work, where a task is performed. Using the Intelex mobile app, a supervisor pulls up a new assessment, captures basic context (location, task, number of people involved) and starts working through the high-energy hazards they see.

The app guides the user through 13 predefined high-energy hazard categories, developed by the Safety Function group and Edison Electric Institute, covering fall from elevation, arc flash, electrical contact, and high temperature. These hazards account for 80–85% of all high-energy exposures workers face, so you don’t need to literally calculate energy levels in the field. The framework does that for you.

For each hazard you identify, there’s a core question to answer: Is a direct control in place?

Direct control targets the hazard itself, effectively mitigates the energy, and continues to work even if a human makes an error. If one is in place, the user logs it and moves on. If not (or if what’s in place doesn’t meet that definition), the user records why and tries to improve the situation on the spot — rather than documenting a gap and walking away.

For example, imagine a worker welding on scaffolding. They have a harness and lanyard, but it’s not attached to an engineered anchor point, and they’re working outside the guardrail. That doesn’t meet the definition of direct control. The supervisor notes the gap, finds a proper anchor point, gets it set up, and logs the improvement.

For the welding itself, the worker has the right heat-resistant PPE. That’s a direct control, and it gets logged as a success.

Once all observations are captured and any follow-up actions are assigned, the assessment is submitted and flows directly into the platform.

Step two: Analyze (HECA score)

Every submitted assessment automatically calculates a HECA score. It’s the ratio of high-energy hazards on that task that had a verified direct control in place. Rather than measuring activity or effort, it verifies whether the physical defenses that prevent fatalities are present.

In the scaffolding example, the worker did not have a direct control in place to address the fall hazard. Even though it was corrected on the spot, it still counts as an exposure. The temperature hazard had proper PPE from the start, so that one is a success. One for two: 50%.

That number tells you something a TRIR report never could because at the moment of observation, nobody had been hurt. Now, you’re not waiting for something to go wrong to find out your controls aren’t working. You’re assessing the situation based on leading metrics.

Safety leaders can also toggle between an aggregate view of the company’s true overall safety profile and more granular levels, viewing scores by:

• Location
• Energy source
• High-energy hazard
• Task

From there, users can drill into action plans that reflect current site conditions rather than outdated snapshots from quarterly audits.

Step three: Strategic improvement

Most safety leaders have to choose carefully where to spend their limited time and budget. The HECA dashboard surfaces systemic patterns across hazards, tasks, and locations, telling them exactly where to deploy resources for the highest impact.

For instance, the dashboard might show that gravity controls across all sites are verified 75% of the time, but electrical is only controlled at 25%.

Without that data, it’s easy to respond with broad investments (new PPE programs, company-wide retraining) that do not address the specific gap. With it, you can target sites and hazard types where the risk is real, but controls are missing.

Since Intelex is also a fully configurable platform, admin users can tailor hazard types, direct controls, tasks, and activities in dropdown lists to match how your organization works. That way, the data you collect reflects the work being done (not a generic template).

Trend data shows whether targeted interventions move the needle on your HECA scores over time, so you can tell the difference between genuine improvement and a temporary spike.

Step four: Classifying incidents with the Safety Classification and Learning model

When an incident or near miss occurs, you can use the SCL model to classify it, so your organization can learn and adapt.

The SCL tool uses a built-in EEI decision tree that walks users through a structured sequence of yes/no questions every time something happens. Instead of relying on individual judgment about whether something was a “near-miss” or a “recordable,” everyone across every site answers the same questions and arrives at consistent classifications. That consistency is what makes organizational learning possible.

If an incident occurs, the app walks you through a structured classification. If the worker on scaffolding missteps and falls because a fall arrest system wasn’t properly in place, the classification looks like this: 

• Was high energy present? Yes, fall from elevation.
• Was there a high-energy incident? Yes, the worker fell.
• Was a serious injury sustained? Even if the answer is no, SCL flags this as a high-potential event.
• Was a direct control in place? No, the worker wasn’t attached to a certified anchor point.

The framework ensures near-misses are treated with the same urgency as fatalities, creating consistency across reports and surfacing risks that TRIR simply can’t catch, such as:

• Low control coverage + high SIF rate: A confirmed systemic failure requiring immediate intervention
• Low control coverage + low SIF rate: This is a high-risk scenario, where the organization hasn’t had a fatality yet, but the HECA scores show that the “stuff that kills” is currently uncontrolled.
• High control coverage + low SIF rate: A “safe” environment where physical defenses are working.

This integrated approach also allows safety directors to prove the ROI of initiatives by demonstrating that increased HECA scores directly correlate to a reduction in SIFs.

Build the capacity to fail safely

The goal has never just been a better TRIR score. It’s making sure every worker can earn a living and still go home to their family.

For years, industrial safety has focused on more observations and fewer papercuts. The work to reduce minor injuries is important, but it doesn’t solve the SIF problem.

HECA and SCL provide the framework to prevent SIFs from ever occurring. It allows a supervisor with any level of expertise or training to ensure proper controls on the bridge crane before the technician ever touches the circuit.

Intelex makes that framework operational at scale with the new HECA application. Embed energy-based safety in your team’s daily mobile workflows, with dashboards that help you turn exposure data into decisions that prevent fatalities.

Watch a demo of Intelex’s HECA application to see how your organization can prevent SIFs.