A Line-Item Breakdown Adjuster turnover tends to get filed under human resources. That is a mistake. When a trained claims adjuster leaves your organization, the financial damage does not stay in the HR budget. It spreads across your loss ratio, your reserves, your litigation rate, and your claim duration numbers. It shows up everywhere except the place where you were looking. CFOs and VPs of Claims routinely underestimate the true…
Imagine walking into a clothing store and being told there is only one size available. It doesn't matter whether you're tall or short, narrow or wide. Athletic or not. Male or female. Everyone gets the same shirt. Most of us would immediately recognize the flaw in that approach. Yet when it comes to professional education, we do it all the time. Organizations spend significant amounts of money on training programs…
“Workers' compensation professionals are often measured by compliance, claim outcomes, and operational performance. While those metrics matter, the greatest impact we make is often felt in the lives of the injured workers we serve.” Danielle Thompson, City of Corpus Christi The Workers' Recovery Professional (WRP) certification was created to help industry professionals look beyond the claim and focus on the whole person. Through education, collaboration, and a recovery-centered philosophy, WRP…
I am not sure why this popped into my head, but I was thinking about a song from the mid-80s from Dire Straits, the song “Money For Nothing” in the first line (and I will take the creative license with the lyric) “Money for nothing and your ‘checks’ (my bad) for free.” It seems a frequent consideration that a percentage of work comp claims are perceived as being embellished, fraudulent,…
The numbers on adjuster turnover are not surprising once you see them. What surprises CFOs is the calculation they have never run: the full cost of losing and replacing a trained workers compensation adjuster, compared to the cost of keeping one through structured professional development. The research is consistent. The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that replacing a mid-level employee costs between 50% and 200% of annual salary. For…
If you had told me fifteen years ago that opioid prescribing would eventually become one of the defining healthcare issues of a generation, I would have believed you. If you had told me that we would spend more than a decade collecting mountains of data, implementing formularies, changing prescribing guidelines, introducing prescription monitoring programs, restricting access, educating physicians, and dramatically reducing opioid utilization, I would have believed that too. I…
When injured employees feel unheard, distrust begins to grow. When they feel supported, recovery has a stronger foundation. Every workers' compensation claim begins with a disruption. One moment, someone is at work doing their job. The next, they are facing pain, uncertainty, and questions they never expected to ask. Will I recover? Will I be able to support my family? Will my employer still want me back? How we respond…
One Color Per Year When I was VP of Claims at CE Heath, we had a problem that was simple to state and harder to solve. Required notices had to be posted. That was the law. But failure to comply created consequences far beyond a regulatory citation. When a worker was injured and looked at the wall, what they found — or did not find — shaped everything that followed.…
Litigation in workers’ compensation is often discussed as if it were an external force. Advertising trends. jurisdictional differences. social dynamics. All of those factors play a role. None of them are where most claims actually change direction. Litigation is rarely random. It is a downstream effect of earlier decisions. If you want to understand what fewer attorney-involved claims mean to your loss ratio, you have to start with a simple…
There was a time when earning a professional credential meant something very specific. It meant you had invested time, demonstrated competence, and met established standards. It meant you had proven a level of mastery that distinguished you from others in your field. The credential itself wasn't valuable because of the paper it was printed on. It was valuable because people trusted what it represented, the combination of its credibility and…
