In the mid-1980s, workers' compensation underwent a management revolution. Until then, employers bought insurance policies, and when injuries occurred, they passed the baton to their carriers. Then they went back to making widgets, trusting that the carriers would take care of everything.

That didn't work out so well, and costs took a rocket ride to the moon. Across America, employers looked for help. Why would injured workers remain out of work long after it was medically necessary for them to do so? The answer, as we all know, was found in the mirror. Employers, themselves, were the key to getting injured workers back into the bosom of the workplace, but they'd never been taught how to do that. Didn't know it was their job.

Thus, was the workers' comp management-consulting industry born. My company, Lynch Ryan, was first out of the gate. We were the Pathfinders, and Peter Rousmaniere was Employee No. 3 in what was to become a 55-person firm. Peter – Groton School, Harvard BA, Harvard MBA – wanted to join us because he was looking for a challenge. I wanted Peter to join us because he was really smart, and his brain worked like nobody's I'd ever met. Peter thought "outside the box" before there was an outside the box.

Peter still thinks like nobody else, and today WorkCompCentral has published his Seismic Shifts: An Essential Guide for Practitioners and CEOs in Workers' Comp, subtitled, How Technology and Demographics Will Impact Workers' Comp from Today through 2022. This self-funded, year-long venture looks out into the future and envisions another revolution, one that we ignore, at our peril.

In Seismic Shifts, Rousmaniere catalogues the nearly unnoticed, but drum-beatingly steady, changes in workers' compensation since the early 1990s. He shows that since 1991, lost-time injuries have declined by 60% and projects that by 2022, there will be a further decline of at least another 35%. He is perplexed about how the insurance industry has missed this decline in injuries and claims, what he calls "the elephant in the room," and suggests that it has done so because for more than a decade it has been obsessively fixated on medical costs, an observation with which I agree. Rousmaniere contends that the insurance industry does not understand how this has happened or why.

His thesis is that this sea change, this seismic shift, is the result of employer improvements in safety engineering, information technology, telematics, robotic design, predictive modeling analytics and the continuous yearning for enhanced productivity. And most important, this natural gravitational movement will continue inexorably. Further, he believes that the workers' compensation insurance industry has not considered where all of this will lead, how it can be part of and optimize this transformational movement and what kind of workforce it will need to take advantage of this new paradigm.

In Rousmaniere's view, workers' compensation practitioners, as well as occupants of the C-Suite, would be well-advised to understand what's happening and embrace, rather than resist, these evolutionary developments. In his mind, the embracers will succeed and control the future; the resisters will be swept away. It's as simple as that. He describes, for example, the profound employer movement toward total absence management, rather than merely occupational absence. The move toward total absence management is gathering steam at larger employers, and workers' comp insurers don't know what to do about that. Neither do they have a plan for coping with the "opt-out" phenomenon. First Texas, then Oklahoma, and just last Friday legislators in Tennessee filed opt-out legislation built on the Oklahoma model. This is becoming a trend.

But the workers' compensation industry has never distinguished itself in the race to the future. It will be interesting, indeed, to see if Rousmaniere's clarion call is even acknowledged by today's potentates. To help it along, WorkCompCentral is hosting a four-part webinar series during which Peter will lay out his thesis and try to persuade others in the workers' comp community to join him in his effort to drag the industry kicking and screaming into the future. Check with WorkCompCentral for dates of the webinars.

Seismic Shifts is an important work, one deserving of your attention and consideration.

Tom Lynch is a founding partner of Lynch Ryan & Associates, a Massachusetts-based employer-consulting firm. This column was reproduced with permission from the firm's Workers' Comp Insider blog.