This week will see most of the nation’s workers’ compensation cognescenti at the Workers’ Compensation Research Institute’s annual conference in beautiful downtown Brahmin Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.
This is WCRI’s 34th annual conference, and it sports an agenda that should satisfy even the geekiest of data geeks.
To me, two things stand out. First, if you’re coming to my home town expecting not to hear much about drugs, I submit you’ve been living on another planet. Three of the eight total sessions address drugs: two on opioids, one on Medical Marijuana.
Dr. Terrence Welsh, Chief Medical Officer at the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, will detail Ohio’s successful program aimed at reducing opioid dependence among injured workers.
In 2011, the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (OBWC) found that more than 8,000 injured workers were opioid-dependent for taking the equivalent of at least 60 mg a day of morphine for 60 or more days. By the end of 2017, that number was reduced to 3,315, which meant 4,714 fewer injured workers were at risk for opioid addiction, overdose, and death than in 2011.
After years of thumb-twiddling, other states have made great strides in combating opioid dependence in workers’ compensation, California and Washington State to name just two. But because workers’ compensation is state-based, there’s no national workers’ compensation solution; every state is on its own. Most are actively engaged in building programs to reverse the deadly trend, but workers’ compensation is only the tiny caboose on the back end of the great big American health care train(wreck). Nationally, the health care industry doesn’t seem to be having as much success as workers’ compensation’s committed leaders.
Evidence: U.S. life expectancy at birth dropped in 2015 for the first time since 1993 during the AIDS epidemic. The years 2015 and 2016 saw the first consecutive two-year drop in life expectancy at birth since 1962/63 (generally attributed to an epidemic of flu). The two-year drop in American’s life expectancy is primarily due to drug deaths. In 2015, the nation suffered 52,400 drug overdose deaths. That’s more people than were killed in car crashes in any year since 1973. In 2016, the total rose to 63,600, more than were killed during the entire Vietnam conflict, which lasted more than a decade. Drug deaths for 2017 appear to be even higher, although, because drug deaths take a long time to certify, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will not be able to calculate final numbers for 2017 until December. No other country in the OECD has seen a drop in life expectancy in recent history.
Although it is obviously appropriate that medical issues make up the preponderance of this year’s WCRI sessions, the Keynote Address, to be given by Dr. Erica Groshen, former head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is of great interest to me. In her presentation, “Future Labor Force Trends and the Impact of Technology,” Dr. Groshen will address and analyze current labor market trends and provide official statistics leading to her views on the future of work. Because I have written about America’s pathetic, more-than-four-decade lack of hourly wage growth, I’ll be keenly interested in her remarks. Here are some questions I’d like her to answer:
- Does Dr. Groshen see any correlation between stagnant hourly wage growth and workers’ compensation’s declining injury frequency and loss costs?
- If this is a current unknown, should WCRI study it? If not WCRI, then who?
- Between 1948 and 1973 there was a one to one correlation between productivity and wages. However, since 1973, productivity has risen nearly 75%; wages about 9%. How does Dr. Groshen see this playing out in the next decade?
Two final thoughts about the upcoming conference. I know time is limited, but I wish WCRI had allotted one session to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and their impact now and in the immediate future on workers and workers’ compensation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to gain significant momentum throughout industry. The workers’ compensation industry is ever so slowly increasing the bandwidth of its AI capability, but it still seems to lag far behind other industries in embracing much that AI has to offer.
Speaking of AI, IBM Q, the creator of Watson, put a 5 cubit quantum computer prototype in the cloud in 2016 and two months ago unveiled a 20 cubit quantum computer available to its clients and a prototype 50 cubit quantum computer. Unlike current computers, which perform operations sequentially, quantum computers perform many operations simultaneously. An operation which currently can take days, or even weeks, will be done on a quantum computer in minutes, or even seconds.
I would love to see the massive brain power at WCRI turn its attention to this fascinating area and its potential impact on the labor force and workers’ compensation.
See you in Boston.
