OK, I have to admit it - I know too little about the world of Workers' Compensation management. I've been so long on the Safety side of industry that I failed to appreciate the absolute depth of consideration Comp folks go to properly manage the care of injured workers. I was surrounded on all sides by post-accident services from Dental repair (they are bones you know!) to every stripe of legal and medical services. Here's what I found most interesting - there is almost a pathological separation from those who administer these injuries and those who could do something about preventing them.
Now, don't get me wrong - Comp folks *know* that an injury prevented is the most effective management. It's just that most professionals work on the wrong side of the house. From what I could tell, most Comp folks report through some type of risk management in their organization (read legal, tax, insurance). Whereas most safety folks usually live under operations and human resources.
So, what's a root-cause-concerned Comp professional to do if they want to leap over the brick wall that seems to separate claims from operations? How about an on-line information system that was designed to house both operational concerns (root cause analysis, tasks assignment, training records, etc) and injury outcomes (lost time, compensation/medical costs, injury type, etc). Hmmm...now, where have I heard that before???
I had the destinct pleasure to present this approach with my colleague Patty Hostine. We had a full room and got a chance to share our approach with a bunch of people. We started by describing our database structure and why databases are WAY better than spreadsheets. We then moved on to helping the group understand why doing all of this on line has lead us to be able to answer such soul-searching questions like:
- How many lost days have we had as a result of injuries associated with Machine X?
- How much have injuries administered by Hospital X cost us?
- What is our total compensation reimbursement exposure on that product?
I think this was the biggest moment of the talk. Being able to draw a straight and uninterrupted line between the results of injuries to the cause of them through the lense of an online data management system is the promise of CoreHSE.com. Ultimately injuries are created by a *system*, not by a person, group, or for heaven's sake, a claims manager. Our approach was to spread ownership for injuries across our organization and ask all who participated in making the injury possible to participate in removing the risk of future injuries.
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