Category: The Rx Professor

Workers' compensation was built for injuries that show up on an X-ray. A fracture can be imaged. A torn rotator cuff can be repaired. PTSD doesn't show up on any scan, and state legislatures are increasingly asking whether that should matter. In September, NCCI published its 2026 Legislative and Regulatory Trends Report, examining the issues occupying state legislatures and regulatory bodies across the country. As usual, there were as many…

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Roger Federer won almost 80% of the 1,526 singles matches he played as a professional. He won only 54% of the points. Let that sink in. A man with 20 Grand Slam titles and 310 weeks ranked number one in the world lost nearly half the points he played. (In baseball, failing 70% of the time at the plate can get you into the Hall of Fame.) During his 2024…

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Your AI tool just turned a two-hour task into 20 minutes. Congratulations. Now, what happened to the other hour and 40 minutes? New research from Wharton suggests many organizations aren’t asking. They’re counting the hours saved instead of what those hours produce. Every technological transformation has promised to make us faster, more productive, and more efficient. Many have delivered (sometimes in ways that nobody originally envisioned). Over four decades in…

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Gerald-Mark (Jerry) Breen had an IQ of 146. He earned a PhD in Health and Public Affairs. He published 30 articles and three books by age 29, one of which was cited by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. He was a co-author of Improving the Quality of Care in Nursing Homes (Johns Hopkins University Press). He was a teacher. He was an accomplished classical pianist. By almost any measure society…

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Four words have quietly ended more careers than any layoff: “I already know enough.” I started my professional career as a mainframe computer operator. Today, I'm the Provost of WorkCompCollege.com. There is no logical career path connecting those two jobs, at least not one I could have predicted when I was sitting at the console of a mainframe computer four decades ago. The common thread throughout was curiosity. I have…

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The workers’ compensation industry is focused on responding to injuries. What if the most important work comp claim is the one we prevent from ever happening? That question was in my head while moderating the National Comp session “Before the Breaking Point: An Integrated Framework for Workplace Violence Prevention and Response” on September 29. Of all the great content included in the agenda, our session was the only one devoted…

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Here is a statistic that seems to contradict itself. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment for claims adjusters, appraisers, examiners, and investigators will decline 6% over the next decade. Yet BLS also projects approximately 21,600 job openings every year. Neither one cancels out the other. Note that the BLS numbers include all insurance claims professionals, not just workers' compensation. But the broader workforce dynamics should sound very familiar.…

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A new healthcare workforce study reports that 70% of Gen Z healthcare workers expect to look for a new role (inside or outside their current organization) within the next year. Only 44% of Gen Z feel “very loyal” to their current employer. Those numbers seem to confirm Gen Z stereotypes: They aren’t loyal They’ll leave a job at the first opportunity They expect promotions too quickly They don’t want to…

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I had a very difficult June, losing both my daughter-in-law and best friend to cancer. During that time (and since), my mind did something predictable. I replayed the circumstances. The extended battle, the moment, the preparation of my BFF's eulogy / watching my son eulogize his wife, the fond memories of the past that remind me there will be no future memories to make. The replays only helped let something…

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In last week’s blog, I wrote about the claims strategy of empathy as a recap from the WCI conference. Just a few days later, I was sitting in a room at the Georgia State Board of Workers’ Compensation conference listening to two experts make that idea tangible. The session was titled “When Life Is Not a Beach.” It featured Josh Schuette of Brooks Rehabilitation and Scott Hoskins of Shamrock Prosthetics.…

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