By Debra Spamer, chief growth officer of Company Nurse powered by Lintelio
As part of developing and maintaining a robust risk management plan, consider the different types of risk episodes facing your organization to ensure efficient processes are in place so claims are properly addressed from the start.
What are Risk Episodes and What Do They Mean for Your Risk Management Plan?
Risk episodes are events that can generate commercial insurance claims and impact costs. These include workplace injuries, general liability, auto accidents, and property claims.
Your risk management plan needs to account for the variety of risk episodes that can occur. Take proactive action by putting in place simple and efficient processes that make it easy for employees and other claimants to report these episodes.
Have a process that requires minimal training so that your employees can make reports in a timely manner, so your organization can have the greatest impact on the handling of risk episodes — before they spiral out of control.
Workplace Injuries
Workplace injuries can be expensive. And your organization has the ability to implement simple solutions to combat the costs of these injuries.
Allow employees to report workplace injury incidents immediately after they occur and offer multiple channels – phone, text, AI – so they can report the way they want, increasing reporting frequency and accuracy. Ideally, the process should provide injured workers with access to a medical professional who can direct them to the care they need — including self-care, which prevents unnecessary visits to medical facilities and, as such, create new claims.
With this strategy, employees get the proper care, preventing their injuries (and claims, if applicable) from worsening and your organization has the information it needs to get ahead of the incident.
Make sure you have access to review these incidents. Bonus points if you can receive the information in a secure fashion, like through a portal, and have the ability to sort them by location, time, injury complaint, and more to understand what injuries are happening in your workplace. These patterns can help you to put in place effective, preventative measures.
Auto Accidents
Millions of workers drive or ride in a vehicle as part of their jobs, according to the CDC. Unfortunately, the CDC also reports that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of workplace fatalities in the United States. In 2019, these cost employers $39 billion dollars — with nonfatal workplace crashes costing employers, on average, $75,000 per injury and fatal crashes costing $751,000 per death.
A defined reporting process can trigger an alert to your organization of an accident immediately and any resulting injuries and/or auto damage. Streamline this procedure and incorporate it with your workplace injury reporting process so that employees sustaining injuries from workplace auto accidents can connect with a medical professional.
Again, by addressing incidents immediately, getting workers to care , and getting vital, accurate information to stakeholders within moments, you can reduce claims, prevent injuries from worsening, and mitigate claims costs.
Liability Claims
When developing a process for liability claims reporting, you want to ensure that you have all the information you need to properly proceed with the claim. Like your other incident reporting processes, it’s important to offer multiple channels so third-party claimants can easily get you information and increase the accuracy of these reports.
While making it easier to report liability claims may seem detrimental to your organization, it is actually a vital preventative measure. When you catch claims immediately, you can address them before they grow into much more costly lawsuits.
In addition, by having your processes hosted by the same tool and your data accessible in a secure, third-party program, you can manage your claims with ease.
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At Company Nurse powered by Lintelio, we use digital technology combined with compassionate human care to provide processes that help Risk Managers to control and mitigate claims costs of risk episodes.
Our seamless risk intervention captures detailed, accurate incident information from the beginning and instantly, securely delivers this information to the stakeholders in the claims management process.
Email info@lintelio.com to learn more!