The Injured Worker Holds the Cards in Their Own Recovery. Here Are Four Ways to Deal Them the Best Hand

The vast majority of injured workers want to get better — they just don’t know how. That certainly was my personal experience and why I even wrote a book about it, The Optimized Patient, while preparing for and recovering from major spine surgery after a car crash.

My point of view was — and is — that the best possible outcome is determined by how committed the patient is to doing everything they can to aid their recovery.

My specific discovery was about the importance of optimizing to navigate the insult of surgery and put the body in an optimized healing posture. Interestingly, that specific idea has a very particular place in the general emerging conversation about the need for enhanced patient engagement.

In my book, as here, I’ll clarify that I am not a doctor or a medical practitioner of any kind. I am also not an athlete or particularly physically fit. I also don’t possess any special knowledge beyond what I experienced before, during and after my surgeries. But simply put, I have the best possible training and most important credential necessary to write about the patient experience: I was a patient and I recovered.

What I have learned attending workers’ compensation conventions and speaking to industry leaders is that the patient is the “wildcard” in the recovery process. There is an increasing awareness that brilliant medical care is worthless if the injured worker doesn’t actively participate in their own recovery.

Several years ago, my perspective caught the attention of thought leaders in the workers’ compensation space as a possible strategy to support the recovery of injured workers in ways that the provision of traditional medical services was not — and here’s why.

We all talk about patient engagement, but there’s a fundamental disconnect in that conversation.

The payer’s point of view seeks to enhance how injured workers engage with the workers’ compensation system to reduce medical spend. Patient optimization seeks to shed light on how injured workers engage with their healing, with a focus on patient education and recovery coaching strategies that yield better outcomes, further reducing medical and disability spend.

At the Denver NCSI conference in June, I attended a panel on patient engagement, “Connect the Dots: Bridging Technology for Brilliant Claim Outcomes.” The panelists talked about emerging technologies and how they improve outcomes by focusing injured workers on their role in their own recovery.

Whether discussing cutting-edge technology or good old-fashioned education and coaching, we were in 100% agreement that an optimized outcome requires that the injured worker be engaged in their own recovery. But on the focus of that engagement, we diverged.

The payers talked about using technology to help the injured worker navigate the workers’ compensation experience and the provision of medical care. But I heard nothing of what I’d learned from the medical providers I spoke to during my research, nothing about the four aspects of patient engagement that are missing from all health care, not just workers’ compensation.

Patient engagement, those providers taught me, entails educating and coaching the injured worker about mindset, nutrition, activity and rest. If the injured worker is not engaged, or in my parlance, optimized, the employer runs the risk of longer-than-necessary recovery times, additional surgeries or the prospect of a simple injury turning into a chronic problem or catastrophic claim.

What I have learned attending workers’ compensation conventions and speaking to industry leaders is that the patient is the “wildcard” in the recovery process. There is an increasing awareness that brilliant medical care is worthless if the injured worker doesn’t actively participate in their own recovery.

Explained Dr. Christopher Hills, noted spine surgeon practicing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming: “You could have an absolute perfectly done surgery, textbook, everyone’s high-fiving at the end of the case. Boy, that couldn’t have gone better. You could have an absolute surgical success and have an absolute clinical failure, and that could be for many reasons.

“Again, patient expectations. There’s a lot of psychosocial issues that come into this, a lot of factors that can give a clinical failure even though you had a surgical success. Having to bring all those together and have them align is critical, and I think that’s something we didn’t pay close enough attention to …”

In a series of subsequent articles, I will share what I’ve learned about the importance of patient education and recovery coaching, and those four key elements that contribute to an optimized recovery outcome — mindset, nutrition, activity and rest. I believe each of them is critically important to successfully engaging injured workers in their own recovery to help them get better faster and stay better longer.

Patient engagement and better outcomes are also the key to reducing costs and contributing to the wellbeing of workers, organizations and the workers’ comp community as a whole. &