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Sponsored by: Kinetic Insurance
Leveraging the Digital Tools to Greatly Reduce Claims Costs
The benefits of return-to-work programs in workers’ compensation are well established across the industry. Faster claim closures, lower costs, and better outcomes for injured employees are widely documented. Yet for many employers, particularly those without dedicated risk management staff, or those in industries like parcel and last-mile delivery, where modified duty options often don’t exist, actually implementing and managing these programs can be a daunting challenge.
“The challenge I remember as an insured was, they just give you this massive three-ring binder when they bind your policy with instructions on how to do it,” said Adam Price, CEO of Kinetic Insurance, who once led a company with more than 400 food delivery drivers.
“There were all these incredible headaches on how to actually implement the programs.”
Adam Price, CEO of Kinetic Insurance
The gap is structure, not willingness
Kinetic Insurance, a workers’ compensation managing general agent (MGA) that grew out of injury prevention technology for frontline workforces, built its approach to return-to-work on a simple premise: employers want to bring workers back. What’s missing is a fast, structured way to do it. As we know, delays in the treatment and recovery of an injured worker leads to deteriorating outcomes.
“What’s broken isn’t that return-to-work programs don’t exist. The problem is how do you get from point A to point B, and get somebody back to work quickly, the same way every time,” Price said.
“That’s really what we focused on and developed a product around. How do you streamline that process, make it digital-first and friendly.”
Speed, Transparency, and Flexibility
An outdated claims process relies heavily on adjusters working through journal-based systems, sometimes checking in on claims 15 or 30 days after an injury. During that window, indemnity payments typically begin accruing and the opportunity for early intervention is lost.
Kinetic has worked to condense that timeline dramatically. The company’s platform integrates with Guidewire through an API that delivers claims information every 30 minutes, along with direct connections to medical providers.
“We are able to get that information sometimes as fast as within an hour of the first medical visit. Then we use knowledge to drive the policyholder to an interface where they can set up a return-to-work offer in five minutes,” Price said.
“So within a couple of hours, they can be tackling something that typically isn’t touched in the industry for maybe fifteen or thirty days.”
Through a dashboard that policyholders use to oversee their workers’ comp policies, Kinetic surfaces three different light-duty accommodation pathways:
The first is Kinetic’s Rapid Return-to-Work program. That’s an in-house managed training course that can be set up in five minutes and used for up to 45 days. Because the training is sedentary and completed on a laptop, it can accommodate most job restrictions, making it particularly valuable for laborious industries like parcel delivery where modified duty options are limited.
The second pathway is self-management, which helps employers who already have return-to-work programs consolidate their documents into one digital system of record.
The third option connects to re-employability services for longer-term indemnity claims. That can include off-site job placements at nonprofits through work-finder programs.
“We will have customers sometimes use all three,” Price said.
“We also see employers mix pathways within a single claim. An employer with only three hours of work that fits an injured worker’s restrictions can use those hours, then fill the rest of the shift with Rapid Return-to-Work training, keeping the worker on a full schedule.”
Quantifying the Impact
Beth Kurina, Chief Actuary, Kinetic Insurance
With several years of data to analyze, Kinetic set out to quantify the results of its approach. The company brought on Beth Kurina as Chief Actuary to apply analytical insight into the common-sense assumption that faster return-to-work drives better outcomes.
“Everyone knows that getting folks back to work faster is good. It’s good for costs. It’s good for the company. It’s good for the employee,” Kurina said.
“But adding that statistical rigor was what I wanted to do to say, ‘Okay, how much benefit are we actually seeing?’”
Kurina analyzed 867 closed claims to eliminate development assumptions that could skew the data, comparing accommodated claims with non-accommodated ones. The findings were significant.
Among non-accommodated claims, roughly 45% closed without any indemnity or wage-replacement payments. Among accommodated claims, that figure jumped to more than 65% — meaning claims routed into a return-to-work pathway were much more likely to close with zero indemnity payments.
The cost differences were equally striking. Indemnity costs on accommodated claims ran about two-thirds lower—roughly $5,750 less per closed claim. Medical costs were approximately 60% lower. In total, accommodated claims cost about $11,500 less than their non-accommodated counterparts.
“I wanted to really control for mix. I wanted to control for time. I wanted to control for anything that might distort the data,” Kurina said.
“I tried to poke at it from different angles and see if there was something that was causing it other than the return-to-work program. And I did conclude that it was the return-to-work program that was significant enough of a difference between the two groups.”
Notably, the indemnity reduction held across every injury category, meaning the results could not be explained by differences in injury mix between the two groups.
“Adoption of the platform has also grown steadily. The percentage of Kinetic policyholders with eligible claims using any form of accommodation rose from more than 55% to more than 75% by the end of 2025.
Beyond the financial results, Price pointed to a cultural benefit that spreads across an employer’s workforce. “It really gives the employee the benefit of seeing that their employer has a plan that is geared towards what we would call a faster and better outcome for the employee. It’s not just ‘go sit at home for a month and see what happens.'”
As the workers’ compensation industry continues to search for ways to control costs while improving outcomes for injured workers, the data from Kinetic’s book suggests that the right combination of technology, process design and claims oversight can deliver measurable improvements.
That includes those employers without the bells and whistles of a Fortune 500 risk management department.
Read the full analysis, visit https://kineticcomp.com/2026-return-to-work-gap.
This article was produced by the R&I Brand Studio, a unit of the advertising department of Risk & Insurance, in collaboration with Kinetic Insurance. The editorial staff of Risk & Insurance had no role in its preparation.
