With the buzz around outcomes-based networks in healthcare and now in workers' compensation, many are trying to understand what these are all about and if they are all created the same. In workers' compensation, one of the main goals for risk manage…

A few weeks ago at the Business Insurance Risk Management Summit in New York City, our President and CEO, Dave North, and I had the honor of accepting one of the 2014 Innovation Awards for our viaOne® express mobile app and push technology. As you c…

By the end of this decade, 76 million baby boomers – who currently make up one-third of the U.S. workforce – will retire. At the same time, we are experiencing a shrinking youth labor force. This shift in workforce has the potential to negatively i…

Office employees and other sedentary workers typically have lower frequency and severity of workers' compensation claims than their more active or labor-intensive coworkers. However, new medical evidence suggests a link between sedentary employment…

Did you know that California is one of only five states in the nation – along with Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island – with a mandatory disability insurance program? In California, the State Disability Insurance (SDI) "State Plan" is fu…

Just when you thought you knew all the acronyms, TRIA (the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act) comes back to the forefront, now known as TRIPRA (Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Reauthorization Act).  First passed in 2002 in its original form, its purpos…

I attended the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2014 conference this week along with over 35,000 attendees and 1,200 vendors participating from all over the world. It was clear that this is the true mecca of heal…

Healthcare is undergoing dramatic change. The operating environment for hospitals is rapidly shifting from a volume-based delivery model to a value-based one. A road map for hospitals to transform from the fee-for-service first curve to the pay-for…

Earlier this week I had a very good conversation with some of my industry peers, including some Sedgwick colleagues and some people who work for other organizations. It was exciting to hear they shared my commitment to doing more to make a difference…

For several years, I have talked with industry friends and clients about the effect of medical marijuana on workers' compensation. I anticipated that we would start to receive requests from doctors for authorization to treat injured employees with me…

I was recently asked to consider whether and how effective workers' compensation reporting really was and whether or not anyone had a truly helpful and effective view into true WC cost of risk (COR) and its related trends. In fact, having spent muc…

Speculation is rife about what will happen with healthcare in 2014. Now one of the first predictors has publicly voiced its opinion. On Wednesday, I read with great interest that Moody's revised its outlook for the U.S. healthcare sector to negativ…

For many employers today, management of the direct and indirect costs of absence and the need to improve employee productivity are critical competitive issues. More effective absence management has become a key initiative. As a result, integrated …

My mom suffers from vascular dementia. It's a progressive, slow, debilitating disease. As a non-medical person new to the maze of healthcare and elderly care, there was a lot to learn. My mom's in a nursing home 10 minutes from my house and I am now …

Recently I was featured on WorkCompWire.com in a Leaders Speak article discussing the top trends to watch in 2014. To begin the dialogue on these important topics, my colleagues and I created "Foresight for '14," which covers seven s…