What business doesn’t want healthy employees? As your company’s workers compensation expert, you are all too familiar with the tremendous costs of workplace injuries. But there are lots of other health issues that can affect your employees. And there are plenty of costs associated with those, too. It’s time to get proactive. You can adopt corporate wellness program ideas that are both affordable and effective, which help prevent workplace injuries.

Healthcare professionals use benchmarks to assess and improve the way they treat patients. Recently, we read an article about physical therapy benchmarks in the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons’ online magazine. It occurred to us that PhysNet’s unique approach eliminates many of the problems providers face in delivering efficient, effective treatment to injured workers.

Physicians who are dispensing drugs to your injured workers may be charging more than a pharmacy would charge. A lot more.

Among some of the reforms made to workers' compensation laws throughout the United States are changes that give employers and insurers a greater degree of control in WC cases. Specifically, employers and insurers often have more power to select providers and challenge decisions about medical treatment through the use of independent medical examiners (IMEs) and mandated treatment guidelines.

It’s not easy being in charge of your company’s workers’ compensation compliance. Sometimes it’s downright frustrating. There are a lot of people involved in the claims process. Your injured worker, their doctor, their physical therapist, your insurer, their adjuster, maybe a TPA. Every one of them wants something. You feel caught in the middle.

Members of our PhysNet team just returned from the National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference & Expo. We’re committed to continuing education like this. It helps us stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in the workers’ compensation field. One of the sessions really caught our attention. It was called “When a Claim Goes Off the Rails.”

A recent review conducted by ProPublic and NPR of the last decade of workers' compensation reforms presents a harsh picture for injured workers. Of course each state's workers' compensation program may be a mixed bag of positives and negatives on its own. For example, California is one of the states where benefits are continuing to increase in alignment with increases in the State Average Weekly Wage. Thus it's difficult to provide a single national assessment whether the reforms improve or degrade the nation's workers' compensation framework.

The grand bargain of workers' compensation is clear. Employees receive fast, reliable access to medical care for workplace injuries in exchange for not suing their employers. As with any bargain, there's needs to be a little good faith on both sides. Thus the short answer to whether employees can be held accountable for injuries resulting from their own unsafe behavior is "sometimes."