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Industry Insights

Lynch: Medical Care Experts: Where Would We Be Without Them?

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If you’ve been following the blog-o-sphere and the LinkedIn-o-sphere, you know that the space is crowded. Lots of workers’ comp practitioners have glommed on to the idea that the way to get ahead is to write and post frequently. Connect with more than 500 others in the profession. Write something, anything, put your name on it and throw it up against the wall to see if anything sticks. Kind of the way Garrison Keillor used to say he changed socks on a book tour.

Every once in a while, something helpful and interesting appears and gains a bit of temporary cachet for itself and for its author. Mostly, the topics center on the persistent rise in medical costs and, even more often, on the insidious and often criminal use of opioids, which a regrettable number of alleged doctors, having checked their Hippocratic Oath at the door, are prescribing at a hell-bent-for-leather rate at a hell-bent-for-leather profit. The poor, unfortunate souls for whom these scripts are written are nothing more than high-cost collateral damage.

Consequently, efforts to control workers’ compensation costs are now almost entirely dedicated to reining in costs associated with medical care, with a huge emphasis on prescription drugs.

And why not? Injury frequency continues its 13-year, asymptotic approach to zero. While the same can’t be said for injury severity, these are, nonetheless, heady times for insurers. Kind of hard not to make money when the combined ratio is in the 90s.

Regardless of how good things are getting in the workers’ comp world, the workplace is still the best place to control, and manage, the work injuries and costs that are bound to occur despite frequency’s decline and the rise of the robots. But that requires educated employers who understand that they, not the vendors to whom they outsource payment responsibilities, are the hub of the workers’ comp wheel, who approach workers’ compensation in a Management 101 kind of way understanding that a systemic, accountable process will reduce costs to a minimum and bolster profits, as well as employee morale and productivity.

This means training supervisors in the proper response to work injuries, keeping close communication with injured workers, creating good relationships with treating physicians, bringing injured workers back to work as soon as possible under medical supervision, seeing that injured workers receive full pay while on modified duty, and measuring success every month just as one measures success in every other business enterprise.

These, and other program components, give enlightened employers a distinctive competitive advantage, and the results will speak for themselves.

But not all employers are enlightened. Many have lost their way. Why?

Well, could it be we took a system we had made relatively simple for employers to manage (and let’s not forget that it is employers who ultimately pay the bills) and made it progressively more complicated with progressively more vested interests?

Many middle-market employers, realizing they have no hope of navigating the haunted house maze medical care has become, have relinquished control to myriad vendors, the “experts.” Climbing this Tower of Babel is beyond them.

The question is: Can we do anything about this? Should we? Or, has this ship long ago sailed?

Tom Lynch is a principal with Lynch Ryan & Associates, a Massachusetts-based employer consulting firm. This column was reprinted with his permission from his Workers' Comp Insider blog.

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