Oregon just required home health agencies to run safety check-ins and issue alert devices
By Jim Hankins
First, a correction that matters, because it is the most common mistake made in this vertical.
None of the panic button mandates reach home health. Washington's covered roles are a closed set of four and a home health aide is not among them. Illinois covers hotels and casinos. New Jersey covers hotels. New York's new provision covers retail. If a vendor is selling you a home health solution on the back of a panic button law, they have not read the law.
The body of law that does reach home health is workplace violence prevention, and it is moving considerably faster. As of 2024, 48 states had at least one workplace violence law and 27 had prevention laws specifically. Oregon's is the one that should have every agency administrator's attention.
What SB 537 says
Chapter 535, 2025 session, operative 1 January 2026. From the Legislature's own staff measure summary, Sections 20 and 21, "Worker Safety in Home Health Care Settings":
"Directs home health service entities to provide workplace training to all home health care workers, to conduct monthly safety assessments, to provide staff with identifying information for their new clients, to create systems for safety check ins, equip staff with emergency alert devices, and to create policies and procedures to manage safety concerns."
Read the bolded clause on its own. A state has required home health agencies to run safety check-in systems and to issue emergency alert devices. Not to consider them, not to assess whether they are warranted. To do it.
That is unusual. Most obligations in this area are general duty language that somebody then has to argue into a specific product. This one names the mechanism.
The rest of the obligation, which is where agencies underestimate the work
The device and the check-in system are the parts a vendor can help with. The rest is process, and there is more of it than the summaries suggest:
Training for every home health care worker, not a subset.
Monthly safety assessments. Monthly, not annually.
Identifying information about new clients, given to staff in advance.
A client intake questionnaire covering pets, pest infestations, and whether the client will secure any weapons before a visit.
Disclosure to staff of any known history of violence for patients referred from a hospital.
Policies and procedures to manage safety concerns once they are raised.
Two of those are worth pausing on. The intake questionnaire and the violence history disclosure both mean information now has to travel to the aide before the visit, which for a lot of agencies is a scheduling and records change rather than a safety purchase. And monthly assessments imply a document that exists twelve times a year and can be produced on request.
Why the timing is unusually favourable
The statute is operative, but Oregon OSHA rulemaking is still in progress, with tentative adoption around October 2026 and an effective date in January 2027. The detailed rule, the one that will say what counts as a check-in system and what qualifies as an emergency alert device, is being written now.
That is an argument for acting early rather than waiting. An agency that has a working check-in process and a documented device standard before the rule lands gets to map its practice onto the rule. An agency that waits gets handed a specification and has about three months to meet it.
Oregon is also small enough to move. There are 117 Medicare-certified agencies in the state, 51 home health and 66 hospice. This is not a market where you need to wait and see what the big operators do, because there are not many.
What a check-in system looks like for a home health aide
The field conditions here are different from a hotel or a guard post, and they favour the check-in half of the model.
An aide arms a check-in when they arrive at an address, with a deadline that matches the expected visit. If they clear it, nothing happens and nobody is bothered. If the deadline passes unanswered, the silence is the signal, and the alert goes to an ordered roster of people who agreed in advance to be reachable. It keeps going until a person acknowledges, not until a notification has been sent.
Three things that matter specifically in home care:
The check-in has one owner, the aide who armed it. Nobody at the agency arms it on their behalf and nobody watches somebody else's. In a workforce that is already managed closely and visits homes where privacy is the whole point, that distinction is not a nicety. It is the difference between a tool staff use and a tool staff work around.
An alert device can be a button rather than an app. An aide whose phone is in a bag in another room, or who is in a situation where visibly using a phone is the wrong move, is not served by an app. A physical button that is already in a pocket is.
The record is part of the deliverable. Monthly assessments and a documented policy both imply evidence. Who was on, who was called, in what order, who acknowledged, how long it took. That log is what an inspector or an insurer will ask for.
Where our limits are
Stated here rather than discovered later, because in this vertical a misunderstanding is a lawsuit.
There is no staffed centre at our company and nobody here is watching your aides. Alerts go to the roster you configure and escalate through your own people. We are not an emergency service. We contact one on your behalf only through automatic SOS on a Garmin inReach, which Garmin Response receives, and outside that we contact nobody but your own roster. We hold no life-safety certification. We are a call-out notification and escalation tool, and we should not be the only way a call-out can reach your people.
We also cannot tell you that using us makes your agency compliant with SB 537. Nobody can, least of all while Oregon OSHA is still drafting. What we can tell you precisely is what our system does, so that you and your counsel can decide whether it covers the clause that names check-in systems and alert devices.
If you run field staff in Oregon
Three things worth doing this quarter, none of which require buying anything:
Read Sections 20 and 21 yourself. It is short, and the clause that matters is one sentence.
Write down your escalation roster. Who gets called when an aide does not check in, in what order, and who is the backstop at 7pm on a Sunday. Most agencies discover position three does not exist.
Decide what your monthly safety assessment is going to be, as a document, before somebody asks to see twelve of them.
Then the device and system question becomes a straightforward one, because you will know what you are actually asking it to do.
Deciding how your agency will comply
Oregon OSHA is still writing the detailed rule, so the agencies choosing their approach now get to choose it rather than inherit it. If you run field staff in Oregon, this is a good month to have the conversation.
Book a call — 20 minutes, and you will leave knowing whether this fits, including if the answer is no.
Not legal advice
This article describes what a published statute or rule says. It is not legal advice, and it is not a compliance opinion about your operation. Read the cited text, and take your own counsel's view before you rely on any of it.
What AlertRoster is, and is not
AlertRoster is a call-out notification and escalation tool. It notifies people who have agreed in advance to be notified, and records what happened. It is not an emergency service. It contacts one on your behalf only when your organization has turned on automatic SOS for a Garmin inReach registered to you: if you miss a check-in while your phone has no signal, the AlertRoster app declares an SOS on that inReach, and Garmin Response, Garmin's emergency coordination service, receives it under your organization's Garmin plan. It is not a fire alarm, a security alarm, or an alarm monitoring service, and it holds no life-safety certification. It is not a replacement for your team's official paging arrangements, and it should not be the only way a call-out can reach your people.
Sources reviewed October 2026. Statutes and rules change; if you are reading this long after that date, check the current text.
About the author
Jim Hankins is the founder and CEO of Cloud Bedrock, LLC and the developer of AlertRoster, which he first launched in 2009. A US Army combat veteran and a 42-year veteran of IT and software development, he has spent much of his career building emergency communications platforms, including as CTO of GEOS, the international emergency response coordination service later acquired by Garmin.