Responsibilities of the Injury Coordinator in a Workers Compensation Cost Management Program

The injury coordinator works in every area of workers’ compensation cost management and is responsible for seeing the other participants perform their roles in accordance with best practices.

Best practices mean formatted ways of handling every step of the workers’ compensation process from setting up your workplace to prevent injuries and training employees to avoid them, all the way to permanently releasing from or returning injured employees to work.

Core responsibilities are listed below and the injury coordinator must adapt these to the current work environment. The injury coordinator also works with (workersxzcompxzkit) the other participants to adapt their responsibilities to conform to best practices for their role.

The injury coordinator describes basic injury management concepts including:

Integrating relevant injury management terminology such as “post-injury response,” “procedures,” “return-to-work program,’ “transitional duty,” “investigations,” and other terms into day-to-day insurance language to heighten employee awareness.

1. Listing and describing workers’ compensation benefits.

2. Identifying who handles the claims.

3. Determining the deductible and being able to descript the workers’ compensation exposure for your company.

4. Identifying who pays for the cost of workers’ compensation at your company e.g the insurance company or your company.

5. Implementing the injury management program at your location while tailoring the program, taking into consideration the company’s culture, the reporting structure and locations and where nearest medical facilities are.

6. Documenting the number of lost days and how many employees are out of work and on transitional duty at the facility.

Author: Robert Elliott, J.D. Sign up for the online newsletter at www.ReduceYourWorkersComp.com to become familiar with workers’ compensation issues. Click on these links to try it for yourself.

WC Calculator www.ReduceYourWorkersComp.com/calculator.php TD Calculator www.ReduceYourWorkersComp.com/transitional-duty-cost-calculator.php WC 101 www.ReduceYourWorkersComp.com/workers_comp.php

Do not use this information without independent verification. All state laws are different. Consult with your corporate legal counsel before implementing any cost containment programs.

©2008 Amaxx Risk Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved under International Copyright Law.