If your company is a large organization with many locations and numerous open claims at each location, you may need to consider having several return-to-work (RTW) coordinators. Have one RTW coordinator for each region. For example, one large company has East, Mid-West and Western Region coordinators. The number of coordinators depends on your claims volume, making sure each coordinator has enough claims to justify a full-time position while ensuring they are not overloaded and unable to follow-up on each claim.
Coordinators do not do the work of adjusters, but facilitate transitional duty and guide location management.
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Understand What Your Third-party Administrator (TPA) Provides
Start your program with a Vendor Day. Look at the capabilities and services provided by your claims administrator; regardless of whether it is an insurance company or a TPA, you need to know all of their capabilities in detail.
Have the claims administrator describe each of their services – a formal presentation; have your TPA come to your office to introduce’ and explain each service. Ask them to bring examples of each report. For instance, ask to see a sample nurse case management report, or an investigators report. Make sure you clearly state your expectations. You want the practice leader or a person who can explain everything about the services to attend.
Include all services: medical cost containment, medical management, investigative, recovery, and risk management information systems.
- To prepare for Vendor Day, gather all literature from the claims administrator — have all sales brochures sent to you advance — and review the response to request for proposal (RFP) if the claims administrator was selected through the RFP Process.
- Familiarize yourself with each available service, learn its name and find out how much it costs. For example, is a nurse case manager a telephonic nurse case manager or a field-based case manager who will attend medical visits with the injured employees?
- Ask lots of questions.Is the case manager’ an RN, an LPN, or a non-licensed person with internal medical training? Before you can determine how effectively a service is delivered, learn the specifics of each service.
Companies often start the workers’ compensation correction process by selecting a new TPA without even knowing they are not using all of the services of their current TPA. For example, a major carrier has nurses who will go to each unit to help identify transitional duty jobs, yet their client was unaware of this service and its benefits. They didn’t know what they didn’t know.
Author Michael Stack, Principal, Amaxx LLC. He is an expert in workers compensation cost containment systems and helps employers reduce their work comp costs by 20% to 50%. He works as a consultant to large and mid-market clients, is co-author of Your Ultimate Guide To Mastering Workers Comp Costs, a comprehensive step-by-step manual of cost containment strategies based on hands-on field experience, and is founder & lead trainer of Amaxx Workers’ Comp Training Center.
Contact: mstack@reduceyourworkerscomp.com.
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