In a little under two weeks occupational healthcare professionals from across the United States will meet in Chicago for the American Occupational Health Conference (AOHC). AOHC 2026 will be one of the largest in-person events for occupational health professionals and kicks off a busy season of professional development and education events designed to improve the delivery of healthcare to employees in a wide variety of industries.
The conference, which brings together over a thousand occupational health practitioners, has three core goals:
- To advance the knowledge, practice, and professional development of physicians and other health professionals who have an interest in the fields of occupational and environmental medicine.
- To facilitate connections, strengthen networks, and share experiences to build a community of colleagues with a common interest in healthy workers, safe workplaces, and thriving environments.
- To promote healthy workers and a healthy world through education and practice.
Within those overarching goals structuring the event, the theme for AOHC 2026 is ‘Healthy workers, healthy world.’ On Sunday, April 19, Dr. Lee S. Newman, Distinguished Professor and Center Director Centers for Health, Work & Environment, Colorado School of Public Health and School of Medicine, University of Colorado, starts by asking attendees to reframe occupational health through the lens of Total Worker Health.
With so many changes and disruptive forces in the world, particularly climate change, what workplaces look like today and today’s risks and stressors for worker health will be completely different in just a few short years. For Newman, a Total Worker Health framework will enable occupational health professionals to keep pace and continue to prioritize worker safety during periods of rapid disruption.
And, of course, no conference would be complete without deep dives and enlightening conversations around the impact of AI. For occupational health professionals, AI holds a great deal of promise to improve the delivery of care through ambient scribes, automated reminders, and the rapid analysis and application of data to key healthcare challenges at the workforce level.
However, while the promise of AI is tremendous, there are some complex challenges to navigate when it comes to governance and compliance, digital privacy, and information security. Another early session at AOHC breaks down these challenges for occupational health professionals. The session, led by Manijeh Berenji, MD MPH, Chief of Occupational Health and Associate Clinical Professor at University of California Irvine, Stephanie Eckerle, JD, Partner at Krieg DeVault LLP, and Jeff Donnell, President of Enterprise Health, will assist occupational health professionals in identifying risk, reviewing frameworks that can assist in meeting governance and data privacy goals and understanding strategies for protecting employee information and confidentiality.
As AOHC 2026 draws closer, conference participants will have difficult choices to make when it comes to which sessions to attend. With so many important topics on the agenda, the conference promises to deliver a wealth of information to occupational health professionals navigating a rapidly changing, unique, and vital area of medical practice.
Can’t attend AOHC? Future Healthcare Today will be in Chicago and will share event insights following the conference. Sign up for our newsletter to get these stories delivered to your inbox.