Editor's Note: Each year,National Underwriter's Excellence in Workers' Compensation RiskManagement Award honors organizations with outstanding losscontrol, safety and return-to-work programs. This year's winners,American Infrastructure Inc.; Aramark Corp.; and Miami-Dade CountyPublic Schools will be honored on Aug. 19 during the 68th annualWorkers' Compensation Educational Conference (WCEC),set for Aug. 18-21 at the Orlando World CenterMarriott.

The award is sponsored by the National Council onCompensation Insurance (NCCI).

During the conference on Aug. 19, NU ExecutiveManaging Editor Shawn Moynihan will lead a roundtable from 1-3 p.m.featuring the risk managers representing all three winners, duringwhich they will share the secrets of their award-winningprograms.

Presented by the Workers' Compensation Institute, the WCECis the largest gathering of its kind in the nation andoffers discipline-specific programs and break-out sessionsfrom hundreds of national speakers, as well as CEU opportunities.For more information on attending, click here.

Every business depends on its employees, but none more so thancompanies in the service sector. With more than 250,000 staffmembers worldwide, ARAMARK Corp. has built its business onproviding professional services, including facilities management,food preparation, and uniform and career apparel.

However, by the early 2000s, ARAMARK was dealing with a Workers'Comp incident rate of nearly 12, taking employees off the job andaffecting the service they could provide. The company was alsocontending with other costs associated with claims-managementproblems.

“Historically, our safety and claims functions weredecentralized. As a result, there was little understanding of therisk drivers and no common strategy for loss prevention or claimsmanagement,” says Senior Vice President, Global Risk ManagementDebbie Rodgers.

“It wasn't unusual for us to face penalties because our TPAcouldn't get information from us to handle claims in a timelymanner. We also had claims that should have been medical-onlybecome lost-time incidents because we weren't handling thempromptly,” adds Carla Wynn, Associate Vice President, StrategicClaims Management.

Following a corporate-wide initiative to address the issue in2004, a senior-level task force asked ARAMARK's risk managementfunction to become the center of excellence for risk control andclaims management. “It wasn't just that our incident rate wasextremely high, it was the realization that each of those incidentsrepresented an injured co-worker,” says Wynn. “We committed tomaking sure that first and foremost our employees weresafe.”

Nine years later, the company has undergone a culturaltransformation that has improved worker safety, halved the incidentrate, and slashed claims costs. ARAMARK's initiative combined a newsafety focus, involving both employees and partners, and new claimsprocesses, including both workflow and technology.

Single Point of Focus

As it began its companywide initiative, ARAMARK recognized thatvisibility into Workers' Comp claims was impeded by a historicallydecentralized process, where claims management duties were oftenadd-ons to the responsibilities of safety professionals anddepartment supervisors.

The company created an Internal Workers' Compensation Team (ICT)located in three offices—ARAMARK's Philadelphia headquarters,Downers Grove, Ill., and Burbank, Calif. The ICT's role spans thespectrum of claim management: from oversight of individual claimsand working with ARAMARK's managed care provider and TPA toproviding education and information on Workers' Comp toemployees.

“Previously, our TPA had to obtain information on claims from ahodgepodge of sources across the company. That made it difficultfor them to obtain wage information, employment information, evensimple information like phone numbers. It was also challenging tokeep track of different state regulations and where our networkproviders were in various locations,” says Wynn.

Today, the ICT provides a single, common point of contact forARAMARK's employees, management and TPA on claims. “The ICT is afacilitator to the entire program,” Wynn says. “It's not justhaving a second set of eyes on the claim; it's having the abilityto provide the right information at the right time to the rightpeople to achieve better claim outcomes.”

ARAMARK also created a new Decision Support & Analytics Team(DSA), armed with a new, internally developed Decision Metrics& Monitoring System (DMM), to analyze the impact of investmentson claim results and shape future investment in loss prevention.And, the company also focused on strengthening relationships withbusiness partners—insurance brokers, carriers, and TPAs—both toimprove service delivery from those partners and to generateadditional ideas for loss control.

“The DSA team has had a profound impact on our strategy byfocusing our resources,” says Rodgers. “By using analytics toidentify emerging trends, we are able to address issues early anddevelop risk control solutions to mitigate those risks. Ourcontinually evolving predictive analytics also helps us to preventworkplace injuries.”

New Processes, Technology

ARAMARK targeted three areas of processes and workflow toimprove WC results and return injured workers to health and getthem back on the job. First, the company utilized predictivemodeling, based on analytics from the DMM, to identify injuriesthat warranted nurse involvement from the outset. Those claims aretransmitted immediately to ARAMARK's managed care provider. “Thisprocess ensures that managed care services are provided quickly andat the outset, but only to those claims requiring such services,”Wynn says.

Second, each new claim is now triaged by the ICT to ensure thateverything is done right from the first notice of lost to claimclosure, consistently and according to ARAMARK's preferences andpractices. That includes identifying return-to-work opportunitiesand subrogation potential.

Lastly, ARAMARK has focused on increasing the utilization ofcare providers in its preferred provider networks. Recognizing thatevery one percent increase in network usage equates to $250,000 inmedical program savings, ARAMARK has charged ICT with theresponsibility of directing workers to network providers in stateswhere such direction is allowed.

Supporting these process changes is technology, including thenew DMM as well as the company's existing claims management andrisk management platforms. Because accurate, timely data isessential for effective analysis, ARAMARK has establishednear-real-time data exchanges with its TPA and managed careprovider.

“That [data exchange] has helped tremendously because we can seeadjuster notes and share other information with the TPA. Havingthat data flow has been valuable in managing claims, helpingsupervisors manage their departments, and answering employees'questions,” Wynn says.

“Centralized risk control and claims functions as well as ourstrong analytics capability have given us strong credibility bothwith our internal stakeholders as well as external stakeholders,including underwriters,” Rodgers adds.

Fixing Slips, Trips, and Falls

One area in which ARAMARK's predictive analytics has paiddividends is in a slip-and-fall reduction program.

When the company created its new Decision Metrics &Monitoring System, it included detailed data-capture fields forcause of loss. Indicating that a claim occurred from a slip, trip,or fall prompts an additional question on how the fall occurred andwhether the cause was normal condition.

“We were able to identify that one-third of our slips, trips,and falls were due to water being on a kitchen floor,” says CarlaWynn, Associate Vice President, Strategic Claims Management. “Giventhe nature of their work, particularly with steam tables, our foodservice employees felt that water on the floor was a normalcondition, which it should not be.”

Therefore, ARAMARK's safety team created a special e-learningmodule designed to address this hazard.

“We trained people to recognize that water on the floor was notnormal and to clean it up when they found it. Our slips, trips, andfalls came down as a result,” Wynn says. Between 2008 and 2012,incidents declined over 35%.

'No One Gets Hurt'

Since its increased safety efforts began in 2004, ARAMARK hascut its incident rate nearly in half. Over the past three yearsalone, indemnity claims are down 13 percent, and the averageincurred loss has dropped 4 percent. The company also recoupsnearly $1.5 million in managed care savings annually.

The hard-dollar impact of reduced frequency and severity onARAMARK's Workers' Comp premium is a savings of $200 million overthe last seven years. But perhaps most important, the number ofemployees out of work due to injury has dropped over 30% during thelast three years alone, an achievement that affects everyone whodepends on the company and the service it provides. The injuryreduction also reflects the goal of ARAMARK's SAFE (SafetyAssurance in Food & Environments) program: “No One GetsHurt.”

“Today, our incident rate and loss costs are going down eventhough our payroll is going up. We're able to reinvest savings fromimproved safety and loss control back in our business, whichbenefits our staff and customers,” Wynn says.

“I am extremely proud of the accomplishments of the Global RiskManagement team,” Rodgers adds. “Through the development of strongpartnerships internally and externally, analytics that direct ouractivities, and tools, training and improved processes, moreARAMARK employees return home safely from their jobs each day.”