There is a moment at every social gathering that those of us in this industry have learned to dread. Someone asks what you do. Now, regarding that question I normally provide the answer that is my stock in trade: As little as possible. But then you have to get serious. You have to say it. And you watch yourself do the thing. You start with “insurance,” which is already a…
Dr. John F. Burton, Jr. died on August 12th at the age of 91. If that name does not immediately register with you, and you work in this industry, I would gently suggest that is a gap worth closing. Give me a few hundred words and I will try to close it. Let me start with the part of the story I own, because it is the only part where…
We measure everything in this industry. We measure lag time, closure ratios, average duration, medical spend per claim, litigation rates, attorney involvement, reserve accuracy, and the number of days between the injury and the first indemnity payment. We have dashboards. We have benchmarking studies. We have entire conference tracks devoted to measuring things, and then a networking reception afterward where we talk about what we measured. Every one of those…
Every organization in workers' compensation has a succession plan. I know this because I have asked. Repeatedly. At conferences, on panels, in the hallway outside the ballroom where the coffee is somehow both burnt and cold. And to their credit, people always have an answer for me. The answer is usually a name. Somewhere in your organization there is a woman named Diane. She may be named Patti, or Sharon,…
There’s a line in Chapter 11 of my book, Thank You for Holding. Your Injury Is Important to Us, that makes some readers wince. It goes something like this: impairment is a fact, disability is a choice. People hear that and immediately assume I’m about to tell injured workers to rub some dirt on it and walk it off. I’m not. If anything, that line is the opposite of tough love. It’s…
People sometimes ask me why we called it WorkCompCollege. It’s a fair question. The word “college” carries certain expectations like ivy-covered buildings, tenured professors, four-year degrees. We don’t have any of those things. What we do have is a belief that stuck with me for years before it finally became an organization: the workers’ compensation industry had an education problem, and until we solve it, nothing else we try will…
Every claims organization has a handbook. Procedures are documented. Protocols are established. Best practices are laminated and posted in break rooms. From a compliance standpoint, most operations have their bases covered. And yet, if you pulled ten random claim files from ten different organizations – all following the same state statutes, all subject to the same regulations – you’d find dramatically different experiences for the injured workers involved. Same rules.…
If you've been in workers' compensation long enough, you've developed a particular twitch. It activates whenever someone announces that comprehensive reform is coming to your state. Your eye starts to flutter. Your blood pressure ticks up. You begin mentally cataloging all the systems, forms, and procedures you're about to relearn. Welcome to reform fatigue. It's the unofficial condition affecting everyone who has survived multiple rounds of legislative overhaul only to…
There’s a moment in every workers’ compensation claim where a human being becomes a file number. It happens almost imperceptibly – somewhere between the first report of injury and the assignment to an adjuster’s caseload. One minute, Maria is a shipping clerk who slipped on a wet floor and is scared about how she’s going to pay her rent while her ankle heals. The next, she’s Claim #WC-2026-047821, one of…
When a hospital closes, the intuitive assumption is that everything gets worse — longer drives, delayed treatment, higher medical costs, extended disability. New research from the Workers’ Compensation Research Institute suggests the reality is more nuanced than that, and the findings carry important implications for employers, carriers, and injured workers in communities losing access to hospital-based care. Bogdan Savych, Senior Policy Analyst at WCRI, presented the institute’s forthcoming study on…
