From Data to Better Outcomes: MedRisk CEO Sri Sridharan on the Future of Workers’ Comp

In June 2026, Dan Reynolds, editor in chief of Risk & Insurance, spoke with Sri Sridharan, CEO of MedRisk. What follows is a transcript of that discussion, edited for length and clarity.

Risk & Insurance: Thanks for meeting with us, Sri. How long have you been CEO of MedRisk?

Sri Sridharan: I’ve been CEO for three and a half years now. I’ve been with MedRisk for just over four years total — it took me about a year to reach this role.

R&I: How does MedRisk leverage data and technology to achieve its business objectives?

SS: We have three objectives. One is to deliver good health outcomes for the patients we engage with every day. The second is to deliver good cost outcomes for the clients we serve. And the third is to deliver faster payments and frictionless engagement for the providers we partner with to achieve the first two. If we don’t take care of our providers, they won’t join us in the journey of delivering good outcomes on health and cost.

We have three divisions: our PT network, a managed network on the physical therapy side; our Bill Review PPO and advanced savings business; and our payment business. Data scale and depth are very important to us. We have a huge amount of data on medical bills in workers’ comp — we process around 40 million bills a year, representing about 55 to 60% of the total spend in this ecosystem, and we’ve built up this data over many years.

This data helps us do certain things really well, and AI is now accelerating that. On the patient engagement side, we touch our patients many times during their recovery process. We send them texts saying, “You have an appointment tomorrow,” “You have an appointment in two hours,” or “How was your appointment? What was your experience?”

Now we’re doing more and more of what we call context-based patient empathy. We read the notes and the bills using AI and data, and if a patient is recovering well, we can say, “They’re recovering really well,” and send a message like, “Congrats, you’re doing a great job on recovery, and we expect to see this progress continue.” If we don’t see that they’re recovering well, we can send a text saying, “We see you’re still in a lot of pain, and if you have any questions, we’re here to help. Here’s a phone number. Please let us know how we can engage with you as you navigate this recovery process.”

Without that data and capability, our engagement wouldn’t be where it is today or where it could be tomorrow, and we couldn’t keep making progress in that ecosystem. Even on the adjuster side, we’re now able to provide progress updates that are far more insightful and useful because we have notes and bills for every date of service.

R&I: With the prevalence of email and text messaging, is there a threshold where texting becomes overwhelming for patients, leading to disengagement or drop-off in response rates?

SS: Our response and engagement rates, which we track very closely, remain very high. I believe this happens because the communication is highly relevant to what patients are going through. It’s not a broad campaign where we contact them every day about something irrelevant.

Instead, we’re sending messages like, “You have an appointment tomorrow,” when they’re in pain and we’re there to engage with them. We also make sure that when our people call, it doesn’t show up as an 800 number. It shows up as MedRisk, Sedgwick, or Gallagher Bassett — something relevant to them for that day and what they’re experiencing.

That’s how we keep the communication relevant and engaging. You’re absolutely right that patients wouldn’t care otherwise.

R&I: How does MedRisk leverage its data and insights to optimize outcomes for clients in both patient engagement and bill review processes?

SS: On the bill review and payment integrity side, we have many clients right now where we have the opportunity to see the full path a bill goes through. We apply fee schedules, we apply state rules, we send it to a PPO, and at the end of that process we can look at the bill and say, “We’ve seen the same CPT code go through different paths for different clients.” We know the range of outcomes we’ve achieved for that bill, and we know what the best possible outcome looks like among those options. We work with our clients to make sure they get the right path for the bill so they get the best outcome.

We’ve had a lot of success working with our partners and clients to optimize that process, and it’s been very well received in our ecosystem.

The same applies to payments. We have data on what the right payment amount is because we’re the bill review processor, and we know each provider’s preference for how they want to get paid — whether it’s ACH, check, echeck, or something else. Because we have that data, we can pay them consistently in the way they want, which helps ensure they keep serving this space, and serve it the way we collectively want them to.

R&I: Historically, have providers in workers’ compensation had poor experiences with managed care organizations? What tangible evidence demonstrates that MedRisk’s processes are making the provider experience not only more enjoyable but also more productive and collaborative?

SS: That’s an interesting question. I think we’ve largely solved for it in our physical therapy business, because we touch 1,600 to 1,800 patients a day, and every time we touch a patient, we touch a provider.

We call them and say, “We have a patient with a shoulder injury who needs PT, has a script for 12 visits, and based on all the data we have, you’re the right provider to treat this patient. We’re going to schedule that care with you.” We want them to see the patient as soon as possible, follow certain guidelines, give us the data on time, and engage with us when needed.

We do that while providing certainty for revenue. If we didn’t do that, it could feel frictional — like all we’re doing is providing oversight. Instead, we’re sending them revenue, patients, and capacity.

We score all the providers we work with, and the ones we partner with are highly scored, with great outcomes. For us to continue that partnership, we expect them to partner with us in this capacity, and when they do, it doesn’t feel frictional.

It’s going to feel frictional if patients go wherever they go and all you’re doing is managing them behind the scenes after the fact.

R&I: How does transparent communication with providers about performance metrics impact business relationships?

SS: I meet with a lot of provider groups, and they want to know how we can do more business together. We’re very transparent with them about what matters: utilization, speed of availability, cost, and patient experience. We collect this data continuously.

Every time a patient leaves a physical therapy visit, we send a text asking, “How was your experience?” on a one-to-five scale. We collect that data every day, and the response rate is around fifty percent. So we know the cost, the utilization, and the patient experience.

We also know their availability, because when we call them, we can see whether they can see a patient in two days, three days, or twenty-four hours. All of that matters. We tell providers these are the things that are important to us, to our patients, and to our clients — and if they do these things well, they’ll get a lot more business.

R&I: MedRisk has made several acquisitions in the past five years. How has the organization managed scaling while bringing in different cultures and maintaining consistent service?

SS: It’s a great question. In all these acquisitions, the first thing we integrated was our client organization. Any external interaction is critical for us to get right from day one, because we touch the same clients through all these acquisitions — whether it’s Bill review, PT, payments, or HCS, we serve the same client base. What we didn’t want was two people from the same organization calling a client with two different solutions.

We did a good job of putting that in place and making sure everybody understands that client service is absolutely critical for us — it’s the way we grew up as a company. Fortunately, a lot of the organizations we acquired had a similar client-focused culture. We just added HCS recently, and when I met with some of their clients, the feedback was tremendous — they said HCS is the benchmark for client partnership and that we did a great job with the acquisition.

Those are great things to hear. That culture has been consistent across our acquisitions, whether it’s Medata, HCS, or Strata — all very client-oriented organizations. That helps us maintain our standards.

We’ve also put controls in place to make sure we’re leveraging the data we have internally. As much as we talk about data externally, we watch everything — some of it hourly, some daily, some weekly. I get a lot of reports, and they help me stay on top of both the results for our clients and our internal processes.

R&I: During your tenure as CEO, what achievement or outcome are you most proud of?

SS: There’s a lot we’re extremely excited about. But if I think about the single most important one, it’s our ability to partner with our clients today versus three years back — in terms of the breadth of the partnership, the strategic nature of the partnership, and our ability to deliver outsized value for our clients.

It’s not one plus one plus one equals three. Because of our data and our collective scale, it’s closer to one plus one plus one equals five for our clients. That’s proven out consistently over the last thirty-six months, and I’m extremely happy with how that’s played out.

The second thing is our ability to leverage that data to achieve those results. And we’ve retained pretty much everybody — most of the people from our acquisitions are still here and serving clients. I’m extremely proud of that too.

R&I: What tools or approaches involving AI and other technological advancements is your team currently considering or implementing?

SS: We’re probably further along than many of our peers. We started piloting several AI solutions in February, and they’ve been tremendously successful for us. In fact, two weeks ago we doubled our investment in this space.

We’re not thinking about AI for expense reduction or productivity gains. We’re predominantly using AI for value creation for our clients. We’re a lot more effective in our clinical review process for medical bills because of AI. We’re a lot more productive in our negotiating process because of AI. And we’re a lot faster at getting the right patient to the right provider because of AI.

The majority of these solutions are live right now for us. I’ll give you an example: we have a voice agent that calls providers and confirms appointments every Monday.

Our nurses working on our platform, where AI is reading the notes, reading the bills, and flagging places they need to prioritize and focus on.

AI is also putting together all the information about what a provider has accepted before, and what similar providers nearby have accepted for that service. When we negotiate with a provider, we have an unbelievable amount of insight for our negotiators — insight they’d otherwise need hours to research, and without the same consistency. These are all live for us today.

We’re super bullish on the value AI can create for our clients. we’re well ahead in this space.

R&I: Is there anything else about the business, outcomes, new tools, or other developments that you’d like to discuss?

SS: I think we’ve touched on the key points. I’m very bullish on the next five years, based on our acquisitions, our data, and our technology. and I think timing played as much of a role here as strategy did. Aggregating this data through these acquisitions accelerated a business case that would have played out either way.

I’m really glad we have the data, the compute, and the technology available today. &