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Diagnostic Solution Reduces Workers Compensation Costs

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Chosen as a Best of the Best Program to Spotlight in the Risk Management & Injury Reduction category, Willis’ Workers Compensation Diagnostic has demonstrated huge quality and cost improvements for the company.

As the acuity of assisted living residents has increased, so too has the risk of injury for associates who assist them with mobility, personal care, and (in the case of dementia) behavior management.

A few years ago, the senior housing team at Willis, a leading global insurance broker, realized that they could apply their extensive experience in the senior care sector to develop a road map that would help providers drive down employee injuries, improve productivity, and reduce escalating workers’ compensation costs. The result is Willis’ Workers Compensation Diagnostic, a project-based service that involves an exhaustive examination of a company’s organization and systems to turn up any areas needing improvement. The goal is to devise a set of specific recommendations for reducing accidents, claims, and costs associated with assisted living and elder care communities.

Willis collaborates with clients to provide a complete picture of their current workers’ comp costs, drivers, processes, and procedures. “The real blind spot is being able to have an organization understand how their policies are interpreted in the field. You can develop a safety policy, but how do you know what’s really happening?” says John Atkinson, managing partner. Willis’ diagnostic “provides them with a different set of glasses that they can use to focus their vision” more effectively.

Providers who undergo the diagnostic learn how to create better pre-loss and post-loss systems, including how to identify risks before they become problems, analyze root causes of accidents, and manage the medical treatment of an injured worker. The employer ends up with a better set of internal benchmarks, thanks in part to Willis’ extensive database containing claims data on more than 200,000 senior housing units, and a culture of accountability becomes more achievable. “If an employee complains of back strain, the managers are trained to say, ‘Hey, let’s go get that checked,’” says Atkinson. “We find that the organizations that are successful are ones where senior management stands behind it and holds regional and local managers accountable for safety results.”

In the four years since its inception, the program has enabled cost reductions between 15 and 40 percent for its senior housing clients. Clients have benefited from more robust training, employee communication and orientation programs, better internal management of workers’ compensation injuries, and less fraud and abuse.

“This program has demonstrated very positive results for our company,” says T. Andrew Smith, executive vice president/general counsel and secretary for Brookdale Senior Living.