Last week, WorkersCompensation.com published a blog post by John D’Alusio entitled, “The Responsibility of Policyholder Education.” In it, Mr. D’Alusio talks about a friend’s troubling, frustrating and painful experience after a work injury, a torn finger tendon. The friend works for a self-insured Florida city whose claims are managed by an unnamed TPA. According to Mr. D’Alusio’s friend, the TPA, slow off the mark, delayed necessary treatment, dueling physicians traded opinions (slowly) and the employer, the city, was uninvolved, uneducated and unhelpful. In a word, clueless.
Mr. D’Alusio’s overarching question in all of this is, “Who’s responsible for educating the employer and employee about the workers comp system?” In other words, who is responsible for teaching workers comp best practices to employers who are all legally required to comply with workers comp statutes?
Here at Workers Comp Insider, we don’t usually talk about ourselves, but Mr. D’Alusio’s question prompts me to step outside that box for a moment, because his question is the same one I faced nearly 30 years ago.
I was an entrepreneur looking to start a business, and friends in the insurance industry suggested looking at workers comp, because costs around the country were raging like a California wildfire, and nobody seemed to have any answers that worked.
Knowing nothing about the subject, I at least had fresh eyes. And what I saw was that, even though workers comp insurers, agents, TPAs, et al, claimed to provide employer education, no one was actually doing it. The only thing employers knew about workers comp was that they had to buy it, and if employees were injured, the insurer was supposed to take care of it. Employers lived in a workers comp wasteland.
That insight was why we created Lynch Ryan with the mission to educate employers that the workplace is the best place to control and manage workers compensation. We were successful in that, and we grew into a substantial and influential management consulting company, and in 1991 Travelers Insurance made us an offer we couldn’t refuse, because they needed help. Heady stuff.
Yet, today, while large, enterprise organizations (many of them our clients), have sophisticated systems in place, systems that start with an unrelenting focus on safety, that provide immediate and excellent care for injured workers when safety fails, that return them to meaningful transitional work along a programmed path back to full duty, and that, consequently, keep costs to an absolute minimum, the other 80% of American business does not have the resources or the training to do the same, as Mr. D’Alusio’s Florida example illustrates. Why? Because traditional training is expensive, and a $7,000 premium (add a zero, if you’d like) doesn’t justify it, so everything is always unplanned and reactive. Moreover, many insurers, TPAs and agents have neither the time nor the inclination to provide meaningful training for the folks who pay the bills.
So, I’m back to my 30-year old question. We have millions of employers in America, call them all students. Who teaches, and how do they do it?
The answer? Technology and eLearning. That’s our new sandbox. What’s yours?
If you’d like to see what we’re doing, here’s a 1-minute tease. Contact Lynch Ryan if you’d like to know more – email me directly or connect with me on LinkedIn.