Workers Transition Network Boosts Return-To-Work Effort Via Non-Profits
Insurers and employers looking to accelerate the return of disabled but functional employees to productive working lives, while resolving difficult and often stagnant workers' compensation or disability claims, might consider a back-to-work vocational rehabilitation alternative being run by the Workers Transition Network.
Part of the LewisCo Group, with offices in Deerfield, Ill., and Bluebell, Pa., WTN is a specialty provider of re-employment and return-to-work solutions in the workers' comp and disability marketplace for insurers, third-party administrators and self-insured employers.
LewisCo provides specialized consulting, claim resolution and information management to insurers and large employers in the areas of disability, workers' comp and health productivity management.
Funded interim employment at a local non-profit organization is what distinguishes WTN from vendors of other re-employment services, according to James Kremer, the organization's executive director.
He said that other vendors have used "the funded employment concept just to create a dispute to settle a claim" by having workers with physical restrictions "do telemarketing out of their home, or tie fishing lures out of their home–something that[most people] probably wouldn't enjoy doing very much."
Additionally, traditional vocational rehabilitation programs work best in cases where a worker does not have many serious restrictions or it's a minor case, Mr. Kremer said.
But under the WTN approach, funded employment "is very much designed in the best interest of the injured worker," and operates from the assumption that most people–even those with serious physical restrictions–when offered choices and the right tools, want to work, he said.
Generally, the workers who participate in a WTN program are receiving "some type of temporary total indemnity benefit or a vocational rehabilitation maintenance benefit of a couple hundred dollars a week," Mr. Kremer said. They also have been out of work for a substantial amount of time.
When the worker is placed in a real job at a not-for-profit agency at an hourly rate set by the non-profit, the disability or workers' comp insurance company effectively converts the benefit it pays into a wage.
In this manner, "any kind of financial hit or disincentive to not cooperate with the program" is eliminated, and the worker receives the psychological boost of earning a paycheck instead of "being on the dole," Mr. Kremer said.
Additionally, the job at the not-for-profit organization is one that the worker's physician has approved and to which the worker's attorney does not object, Mr. Kremer stated.
The non-profit organizations in which workers are placed include Goodwill Industries, the Red Cross, soup kitchens and cultural institutions, WTN said.
Mr. Kremer stated that the participants in a WTN program generally remain at a non-profit from four-to-12 months.
While there, they also work "on a very intense and rigorous basis" with a vocational counselor contracted by WTN and trained in WTN methodologies, who helps steer them toward a new full-time career, he said.
WTN said that its program has resulted in a claims resolution rate of more than 90 percent of all cases referred to it to date. Mr. Kremer said that only one participant was unable to return to employment, and that was due to a medical regression.
WTN, which originated in 1993 in Lancaster, Pa., has identified 15-to-20 states in which the regulatory or statutory climate would support the program.
"We're concentrating on states where vocational rehabilitation is a mandatory benefit [and where] it's also mandatory that the injured worker cooperate with good faith efforts to get them back to work," Mr. Kremer said.
But another WTN outplacement program should be acceptable in any state, Mr. Kremer said. He explained that it is a program that provides an alternative to light-duty or transitional jobs that an employer may not or cannot offer to the less seriously injured employee.
"If someone breaks a leg and needs sit-down duty for six weeks and the employer cannot accommodate that," Mr. Kremer said, Interim Employment Services finds a not-for-profit job for that person. "This way the employer just continues the wages or light-duty wage and donates this labor to the community not-for-profit," he stated.
"This is a great way for companies to improve their corporate image," particularly these days when "companies are taking a beating" in terms of public relations, Mr. Kremer added.
Like WTN's vocational rehabilitation program, the Interim Employment Services program tends to weed out malingerers or workers who are not seriously injured, he said.
Rather than go work to a non-profit agency, these workers generally prefer to settle their claims and return to their regular jobs much sooner or to seek employment elsewhere on their own, Mr. Kremer added.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, December 30, 2002. Copyright 2002 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
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