Biomedical vs Biopsychosocial – Thanksgiving Edition

 

Hey there and happy Thanksgiving to you and to your family. My name is Michael stack and I’m the CEO of Amaxx. And today we want to talk about this concept that we all experienced and the Thanksgiving gatherings this past week, and use it as a tool to put into context, this idea and importance of understanding how creeping catastrophic claims can happen, how creeping catastrophic claims can happen and how we need to proactively be in front of them. So let’s talk about this idea at the Thanksgiving table. We’ve got family members, which is a beautiful thing. Everyone comes together, but oftentimes it also of course, comes with its challenges and sometimes frustrations there’s different socioeconomic levels within families. There’s different political beliefs within families are different colors at different creeds. There’s different, oftentimes various makeups of what a family looks like and how fantastic that is that we can all come together and break bread.

But of course we all know, and everyone’s family has their own little dynamics of how they work. And those come with a few little wrinkles. Oftentimes that can be challenging. So let’s talk about this idea of catastrophic versus cat creeping catastrophic, and then let’s pull and tie this whole thing in together in regards to what it means for, from Thanksgiving. All right. So catastrophic claims. These are the ones that we traditionally think of as the very gruesome and very difficult clamps. So these are the amputations. These are the severe burns. These are the traumatic brain injuries, et cetera. Things of that are fall into that type of category. That type of very severe injury, which of course we never wish on anyone creeping catastrophic claims. On the other hand, knees, shoulders, hips back. You know, these are not the type of injuries oftentimes that we think of as being very severe, that we think of these as being a lot more routine, knee shoulders, hips backs, you know, pretty, pretty standard.

We see these things all the time in the worktop industry. So how can these even possibly be considered in the same type of category or have the same life impact as these over here, these are very clear, very clean, very easy to understand, very difficult and challenging type injuries. But these are the other hand we view as routine. We should be able to physically get these people back in business and back to work. But what happens is they often end up impacted very personally in a similar way. They never work again. They have very difficult time managing the industry and it spirals and spirals and spirals and spirals down to becoming very personally impactful for that individual negatively and very financially expensive. So let’s talk about this idea of biomedical. So the idea of biomedical is very simple is that the pain equals a physical injury.

So pain equals a physical injury, hurt your shoulder. Your shoulder hurts because you heard it cause you whacked it on something cause you fell down and you dislocated or whatever it is that you did. So the pain equals a physical, the bio-psychosocial model, which has emerged in recent years. And it’s been around for decades, of course, but it’s becoming more and more and more and more accepted and more and more treated in the industry for looking at it this way. B just because it’s gaining importance doesn’t mean we need to take our foot off the gas because it’s so important as far as understanding this stuff. So bio-cycle show this has to do with the, of course the physical pain is a piece of that, but it’s also by bio biological, biological. It’s also psychological.

It’s also social. And it’s also the environment that that person is the difficult economic circumstances that someone might be dealing with. When you think about your Thanksgiving gathering that we just had these type of creeping catastrophic claims, aren’t happening to people off in the distance that we don’t know. This can be a very common and easy to get to place. Think about your family. Think about the dynamic. Think about those individuals that you just connected with. Is there one or two individuals that you could say are at a high risk of possibly falling into this category? If they had an injury, is there one or two or possibly more individuals within the gathering within the people that, you know, within the people that you just had Turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes with that might be at a high risk of falling into this category.

We need to know and understand that this bio-psycho-social model everything that’s going on. These seemingly routine claims can happen very regularly. They can happen to people that we know they can happen because of challenging biological, psychological, social, economic circumstances that are happening in a person’s life. That means that the pain or the challenges that they’re feeling are not just because of the injury. It’s because of a lot of other stuff. The more that we can connect this, the more that we can understand this, the more that we can think about our own gatherings that we just add and think about, oh yeah, I can see uncle Tom or, you know, cousin Jane. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Jane’s got a few things going on in her life right now that would, would make an injury a lot more challenging and I can see how that would happen.

So the more that we can understand that personally is the more that we can understand and put systems in place to try to identify these early, understand these high risk cases early, and then give them the help that they need to help that claim to stop that claim from going off the tracks were cop can be a very complicated puzzle. We need to understand these drivers, understand these techniques and understand the impact that it can make on individual lives. When we do that, we not only impact our company’s bottom line, but we severely impact the lives of injured workers. So be great.

 

Author Michael Stack, CEO Amaxx LLC. He is an expert in workers’ compensation cost containment systems and helps employers reduce their workers’ comp costs by 20% to 50%. He works as a consultant to large and mid-market clients, is a 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 the founder & lead trainer of Amaxx Workers’ Comp Training Center, which offers the Certified Master of Workers’ Compensation national designation.

Contact: [email protected].

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