I’d like to share with you a couple of thoughts on how the Institute helps to train and certify insurance agents who assist employers in driving down their workers’ compensation insurance costs, reduce the amount of headaches and frustration in dealing with injured employees, improve their productivity and profitability, as well as finding and fixing mistakes that occur in the system, and returning money back to employers.

We approach workers’ compensation different than most insurance agents and employers have ever met. We break our process down into three steps. The three boxes we call them. Financing injuries, effectively managing injuries after they occur, and of course, effectively preventing injuries. We view the workers’ compensation policy as a financing mechanism, because ultimately employers will pay for all of their employee injuries. The insurance company ultimately does not pay and we share with employers and show employers how the impact on their experience modification factor ultimately causes them to pay for all their injury costs.

So we’re dealing with more of a financing mechanism. We’re dealing with a policy that also has many errors and mistakes in the premium audit process. The experience mods can often be incorrect, or at the very least, mismanaged, and we want to show employers the real key cost drivers that go through their work comp policy. Once we move into managing injuries, about 50% of the cost of all injuries are completely unnecessary and we want to show employers how to effectively manage that injury after it occurs and of course, we want to help employers prevent injuries, which we have found that a first step is safety program and safety compliance and training. But we must move beyond that. Because it’s the Institute’s objective that injury problems start at date-of-hire not at date-of-injury, and we work with our employers and our agents to assist them in the corporate culture, employer relationships and hiring practices that will assist them in not only reducing the number of injuries, but also reducing the duration of those injuries that do occur.

Check out the other audios and you’ll hear more details about these three boxes. The financing injury box, the managing injury box, and a preventing injuries box.