Risk All Star Darrell Mathis Is Transforming Workers’ Compensation for City of Chicago

Managing workers’ compensation claims for a city with 36,000 employees could never be easy. But claims veteran Darrell Mathis is forging a team approach that, since 2020, has saved the City of Chicago more than $31 million in reduced lost workdays, settlement values, medical management and investigations costs. 

When he took on the job of director of workers’ compensation in 2020, Mathis got to work leveraging the city’s relationship with third-party administrator Gallagher Bassett to address several challenges. One challenge was transitioning from a self-administered program to a TPA-administered program. 

“That was a little different for the departments at large, my customers throughout the city, to know how to report claims and to understand the parameters under which our TPA would operate in investigating and evaluating claims,” Mathis said. 

A second challenge was assessing the city’s claims exposures to be able to create an accurate valuation for booking future expenses. Yet a third challenge was that Mathis was operating with a team, and many of its members were new to the job, leaving him to do it without the guidance of previous claims leadership. 

“The fundamentals are in place. Now, it’s about getting rid of long-tailed claims and thinking of creative strategies for settlement of those claims.” — Darrell Mathis, director of workers’
compensation, City of Chicago

“There wasn’t a road map,” Mathis said. Luckily for the City of Chicago, Mathis came to the position with an extensive claims résumé, one that included stints with Sedgwick, Liberty Mutual and CNA, and most recently as director of global claims management for Hyatt Hotels, the global hospi­tality company. 

In addition to working with Gallagher Bassett to assess claims exposures, Mathis collaborated with various stakeholders to combine environmental health and safety, loss prevention and risk control under the same umbrella. 

“Instrumental in this change has been buy-in from bargaining units, the department of human resources and the city’s legal department,” Mathis said. “I also had the full support of the comptroller for the city, who by municipal code owns the program, and I am his designee to administer it.” 

Being a claims veteran, Mathis knew that a robust return-to-work program and a nurse triage program would be instrumental in creating a more worker-centered approach to claims management that would reduce the instances of litigation. 

His team’s more human-centered approach has resulted in a 65% reduction in reopened claims counts; a 5 to 10% reduction in lost workdays in claims at 12 months and 24 months, respectively; and a 17% increase in settlement activity with no significant impact to average and/or mean settlement values. 

As a younger man, Mathis dreamed of becoming the mayor of Chicago. Now, he is proud to work alongside Mayor Brandon Johnson and help create a lasting legacy stemming from more than 25 years of claims management experience. 

But Mathis and his team aren’t done: “The fundamentals are in place,” Mathis said. “Now, it’s about getting rid of long-tailed claims and thinking of creative strategies for settlement of those claims, as well as really leaning into our environmental health and safety efforts to mitigate frequency. 

“The program results that we have had thus far prove that when you apply best practices to something that is government-run, you’ll find that you’ll have good results just as you would in the private sector,” he said. &

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