The Innovation That Eludes Workers’ Comp

If a convention is about anything, it’s about discovering great ideas that will help get the job of workers’ comp done better, faster and cheaper — the goal being to enjoy all three, not just one or two of those benefits.

As a civilian at many workers’ comp conventions championing the value of patient engagement, I have enjoyed a lot of enthusiastic discussions about the injured worker’s role in their recovery. Unfortunately, the industry focus on the cost of inputs rather than the value of improving outcomes fosters an environment where it seems innovations go to die.

Five years ago, my book, The Optimized Patient, caught the attention of the workers’ comp industry. I was fortunate to have the late Bill Walton deliver a keynote at a major national conference on the subject of the importance of having a coach “who is coming back from the place you want to go.”

That place, in the workers’ comp space, is fully recovered and back to work. As a professional athlete who endured 39 orthopedic surgeries, Walton’s goal was to get better as fast as possible to get back in the game.

The concept seemed obviously relevant to every employer that is paying medical bills and compensation to sidelined workers. Together with other injured workers, I set out to innovate a system, a method, to help injured workers “get better faster and stay better longer.”

Remarkably, separate and apart from the effort our team was making working to focus on the importance of optimizing patients after an injury or before and after surgery, Integer Health was conducting an analysis of a similar innovation both in Ohio and in Fort Worth.

The effort to get the injured worker back in the game as fast as possible in sports is secondary to the cost of doing so. The focus is on the outcome, getting back in the game, not simply controlling the cost of care provided to the worker.

The overlap in our quests to understand how to accelerate recovery times came to the same conclusion, despite the fact that we looked at innovation from two markedly different perspectives. We both envisioned a shift in the workers’ comp paradigm to move from reducing the cost of inputs (doctors, networks, drugs) to improving the rate of outcomes (shortening the interval of returning the injured worker back to the workplace).

Consider the workplace injury in professional sports — extremely valuable personnel sidelined by an injury while on the job. It’s a somewhat extreme example, but it contains the seed of an innovation that that has in large part eluded the workers’ comp space.

The effort to get the injured worker back in the game as fast as possible in sports is secondary to the cost of doing so. The focus is on the outcome, getting back in the game, not simply controlling the cost of care provided to the worker.

Wait a second … are you suggesting that we throw more money at getting the worker back to work?!

The answer is — that is not the right question, because it is a snapshot assessment of a dynamic process. What Integer Health determined, after a robust  years-long study, was that small improvements in delivery (slightly higher costs) resulted in greater savings in a significantly faster return to work (improved outcomes) at a lower overall cost.

In October in Las Vegas at National Comp, the principals of Integer Health will join me on stage to detail the cost savings that can be enjoyed by the workers’ comp industry if we understand the innovative dynamics of saving money by improving outcomes. Our panel will be the closing presentation for the convention.

Our presentation is not just for case managers and chief medical officers. The effort to innovate improvements in outcomes to reduce the bottom line of every employer should be of interest to CEOs and CFOs as well. Our goal is to help shed light on cost savings realized by improving outcomes. It’s an innovation that should not be allowed to die. &