Digitally Transform Your Workers Compensation

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is hurtling through our economic, socio-cultural and political landscapes, and driving unprecedented transformation. It’s being fuelled by lightning-fast developments in technology, and the fusion of artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, the Internet of Things, and more. It’s also accompanied by a generational shift that brings with it new customer expectations.

The Millennial impact

Cognizant’s ‘Engineering the Next-Gen Digital Claims Organisation’ white paper explains how gradual macroeconomic shifts have given the Australian insurance industry a new form. 

This reshaping is underpinned by the 17% growth in the Millennial generation in the 10 years from 2016, during which it will go from 7.2 million to 8.3 million. Millennials are digital natives and take for granted the provision of an omni-channel experience.

Deloitte’s examination of the future of workers compensation also discusses how the surge in customer-centric digital participation, and pledges of immediate, automated interactions by companies such as Facebook and Amazon, have resulted in workers compensation clients also expecting speed and digital service through the claims processing lifecycle.

End-to-end injury management modernisation

Most organisations are now digitised. However, they may still be operating unwieldy systems or, they may not have fully brought all their processes along the digital transformation journey. 

Injury compliance, specifically, is one area whose full end-to-end digitisation needs to be prioritised. Digital workflows must communicate seamlessly with injury workflows, and ‘sticky tape’ solutions that impede productivity and compromise compliance are no longer acceptable.

Organisations need to: 

• Build a resilient workers compensation strategy that empowers the injured worker and improves return-to-work outcomes; and
• Use the right technology to empower safety, and injury and claims management teams to make better decisions that enhance workplace health and safety, and claim upshot.

Injury management focuses on an employee’s recovery and their safe and timely return to the workforce. Central to these is facilitating the claims experience. Today, a

laid-up worker expects to navigate life quickly via smartphone. They don’t want to fill out paper forms, and even if they do complete them, they may not be able to access a scanner for their submission, or for that of other necessary documentation. A fully digitised injury management system provides them, for instance, with the ability to submit via any device, regardless of location. It also handles the obtaining of the right digitised approvals and ensures tight audit trails.

Organisations also need to focus on meeting their KPIs, improving productivity efficiencies, and ensuring compliance. Modernised digitalisation can make a significant contribution in areas of auditability and governance. 

Moving to an effective online Cloud-based platform is a step you can take right now. A Cloud-based platform can improve the injured workers experience, and the claims outcome, and provide key injury statistics for better insights.  

Some numbers for context

Safe Work Australia reporting shows that in the period 2019-20, Australia saw a total of 120,355 serious work-related injury and disease claims; at a rate of 6.1 serious claims per million hours worked, a median compensation of $13,500 paid per claim, and median time lost of 6.6 weeks per serious claim. 

Of these serious claims, 9% related to mental health injuries, a growing area of focus due to improvements in awareness and cultural changes in the workplace. Organisations are now studying various aspects of mental health injury such as the progression of such injuries, the time at which they can become claimable, and their lifecycle. 

Solv: Helping to transform injury, claims and self-insurance

Our Solv platform is a complete, online, end-to-end injury, claims and self-insurance management solution that gives our clients the tools they need to effectively manage workers compensation.

It also provides them with real-time information and comprehensive insights into their injury and claims landscape to better understand the risk across injury types, claim durations, return to work outcomes, and associated costs. Our clients can leverage these insights to refine current processes to improve future strategies for their workplace. 

Key benefits of digitising injury and claims

Solv delivers:

• Technology systems/platform that enable pre-population of data and automation to support staff in their engagement with injured workers, and in tracking the progress and recovery of an injured worker to secure the best return-to-work outcomes.
  
• Document digitisation to enhance document management, and simplify the storing and retrieving of claims-related material for case management staff.
  
• Complete Overview – an accessible location for all injury and claim information – a single source of truth for the workers compensation team and other relevant third parties.
  
• Data and analytics so that key insights can be used to develop, refine and improve processes and strategies to achieve optimal results.   

Expectations in the workers compensation arena are being challenged and transformed by digital leaps and powerful emerging computing technology.

Don’t let your organisation suddenly find itself standing before the unrelenting train of this revolution. Help it leap on board instead.