Survey Reveals Top Challenges of Workers’ Comp Stakeholders in 2022

Of workers surveyed, 3 out of 4 (76%) said they are more likely to join or stay with an employer that prioritizes their physical safety. That percentage jumps to 82% among workers who have previously been injured on the job.

The survey was conducted by Centiment for Ansell, a leader in safety solutions. More than 500 workers and decision-makers in the warehousing and manufacturing industries were surveyed.

According to the survey, 53% of workers see something in the workplace that poses a hazard between one and two times a week, 25% see risks between three and five times a week, and 11% see risks six or more times a week. Respondents said employers could improve workplace safety by quickly responding to safety hazards like damaged equipment or spills (47%); increasing real-time communication with team members about safety hazards (39%); alerting employees where, when and what PPE to wear (37%); and providing more visibility to how quickly safety issues are resolved (31%).

Other key findings include:

• Of employees with two or more years of experience, 54% said their employer could improve how they coach employees on proper form, compared to 43% of workers employed one year or less.
• Nine out of 10 manufacturing, warehousing and distribution workers are interested in wearing connected technology that identifies unsafe physical movements and makes customized recommendations to reduce workplace risks.
• Three-quarters of respondents receive less than 30 minutes of safety training per week. Another 20% don’t receive any weekly training.

More information is available here.

Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) serve as the middlemen between drug companies and insurers, creating customized formularies, developing pharmacy networks, processing claims, providing critical clinical oversight, providing access to prescription needs for injured employees, offering discounted medications, and much more.

Isn’t it time for a new perspective? … Your perspective matters!

Risk managers across many industries sat around a whiteboard and collaborated on the shared problems they had experienced for decades. They lamented on the industry –unchanged for decades.

They lamented the vendors and the vendor perspective. But what about their perspective? Their needs? The needs of the injured employee? 

Prescription medications comprise a significant share of workers’ compensation costs, accounting for approximately 14% of a workers’ compensation claim. So how do you get what you need? How do you get the right prescriptions in the hands of the right injured employee at the right time for the right cost? And how do you ensure this is accomplished every time? 

In technology, when measuring uptime, anything below 99.7% is considered unstable. In manufacturing, error rates are measured for every million products coming off the line. How great would it be if 99.7% of each script filled met your objectives?

Who is your PBM?

The first question to ask yourself is, “Who is my PBM?” For bundled programs, we know who the TPA’s or the managed care provider’s PBM is. But who is your PBM? Do you have clear and unfettered access to your PBM team? What is your escalation path? When you have partners that report directly to you, then you have a PBM that lives solely for the purpose of serving your perspective and your interest, and not the interest of the bundler.

Are we focused on the right things?

Another consideration is focus. The street hustler of New York asks you to keep your eyes on the card in order to keep you from noticing what the hustler is doing with his other hand. Similarly, we all intuitively know that any “savings” number not compared to a fee schedule is more theater than a key performance indicator. Your overall spend is what is important, and that spend includes much, much more than “savings.” It includes the $10 bill review fee for each prescription, the out-of-network leakage, the rogue biller cost, the efficacy of clinical oversight (and clinical should be free), utilization efficiency, and much more. 

My injured employee matters most!

The injured employee experience also empowers or enrages your injured employees. Daily, we use DoorDash, Uber and Amazon in seconds with little effort. The injured worker expects that degree of ease and service when it comes to the orchestration of services in their claim. Many workers’ compensation service providers like us deploy sentiment AI algorithms to understand the frustration levels of the injured employee, because we know a discouraged injured employee can lead to a litigated case unnecessarily. And we all know an unnecessarily litigated claim leads to unnecessary expense and inefficient operations. 

So how do you get 99.7% of all your pharmacy spend to meet your financial and clinical standards? In a nutshell, sometimes we must ignore the theater and engage in much more substantive and authentic collaborations to achieve the outcomes we want.