Insurers Help Customers Keep Injuries Low

He said a pilot program was run in two centers–the companys Syracuse Lost Time Center, which handles all lost time claims for the state of New York, and in the Kansas Lost Time Center, which handles all lost time claims for 10 Midwestern states.

The results showed that when the teamwork strategy was used, injured workers returned to work "in excess of one week quicker" than they did when the teamwork strategy wasnt in place, he said. "When you consider that indemnity costs alone average about $72 per day, countrywide, you can begin to grasp the significant financial effects this strategy can have."

Mr. Crabb said that a proprietary study used to put together the strategy showed that as early as six weeks into the life of a claim, "there is already a decreased likelihood that the injured worker will ever return to work."

By 12 weeks of disability, he said, "there is only a 50 percent likelihood that the injured worker will ever return to work." And after one year, "there is only a 1 to 2 percent chance that the injured worker will ever go back to work."

Mark Deluse, assistant vice president, quality assurance for The Hartfords claim business group, said success of the program was demonstrated in the pilots. One example in upstate New York involved a coalition of hospitals with no return-to-work policy, he said.

After many attempts to educate the employers, "we finally got through to a risk manager who understood," Mr. Deluse said. The difficulty was that injured nurses could not perform their jobs, which often involved heavy lifting of patients, he explained. Risk management adopted a return-to-work program that now allows those nurses to work on the floor doing jobs such as delivering medications, working on paperwork and filling in on off-shifts, he said.

The program makes The Hartford a return-to-work consultant for small and mid-sized companies, he said. Experience gained with one organization can be shared with other companies of similar sizes and in similar businesses, he said.

Boston-based Liberty Mutual said its program consists of more than 600 consultants who work with customers, doing risk assessments for underwriters and setting up a service plan focused on reducing their sources of loss.

"We look at their actual sources of loss based on their experience or potential sources of loss that haven't occurred yet," said Karl Jacobson, a senior vice president of loss prevention at Liberty Mutual. He said a loss analysis is created for every customer, comparing their losses to Liberty Mutual's existing book of business in the same standard industrial class, or SIC code, and to Department of Labor statistics.

"So now we have an understanding of how this customer's doing," he said. "Then we work with them to improve in the areas where they need help."

The number-one area for injuries is overexertion "from manually handling materials," he said. "It's 28 percent of this country's losses. There are very few industries where that is not number one."

He said the tasks performed are analyzed by computer applications. "We actually measure the weights of the objects, the distances they are handled, vertically and horizontally," he said.

The information is entered into a computer application that shows the energy expended for the task based on how often the task is performed.

Next recommendations are submitted for improving the task. These parameters are also added to the application to form "what if" scenarios, he explained.

"A lot of goods are handled unnecessarily in the workforce," he said. One example is a machine operator whose job is to take goods from one palette, feed them to a machine and stack a product onto another palette.

The goods are dropped by forklift onto the first palette next to the machine, he said. "So the worker has to stoop over, pick up that part, put it on the machine, do the work, and then usually turn around and put it on an empty palette on the other side."

A very simple solution, he said, would be for the forklift to drop the goods onto an elevated table so the part could be slid over to the machine instead of lifted. Or it could be put on a conveyor making it unnecessary for the worker to move the part at all.

"There are a lot of techniques that can be used that don't have to be expensive," he saidtechniques that can increase productivity and safety as well as job satisfaction.

One of the few industries where overexertion is not the primary cause of loss is construction, he said. "There it is slips and falls," he noted, "from heights and on the same level."

He added that effective measures can also be taken for businesses with no profile for causes of loss. "It's very well documented in reference materials what kinds of exposures there are on certain kinds of businesses," he said. "We would work with them to identify uncontrolled exposures that may not yet have caused loss."

He explained: "If you see manual handling that may not be necessary, the likelihood of it eventually causing loss is pretty high. We would work with the customer to control that before it causes injury."

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, July 7, 2003. Copyright 2003 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.