There is one insurance policy that exists that you have the ability to control how much you pay…
Any guess as to what that policy may be? You guessed it by the title of this article. It’s your Worker’s Compensation policy! Let’s talk about a few different ways that you can do that.
The first thing we can do is have an SOP, have a standard operating procedure on “when and how to report an injury”, and have every employee and manager in your business trained on the process and proper injury reporting. That helps you in a few different ways. Let’s look at this one; an employee gets a cut on their finger, doesn’t say anything while thinking it’s not a big deal, and they try to care for it themselves. A week goes by, and that finger gets infected. Now it’s a more severe injury, and they need to go see a doctor for more extensive care than what could have never initially been required. Now it’s starting to effect your work comp policy. Now we have a medical payout that will be paid, along with indemnity, should the employee have to miss any time from work. And it’s things that could have been avoided if the injury had been reported when it happened and basic medical treatment been applied/ Number two, that process helps you gather more detail and accurate detail of what actually happened with that claim. So when it gets reported to the insurance company, it comes up on the loss reports accurately. One thing that we see is claims being misreported or details being left out of a claim that then don’t make it to the loss history properly, which then doesn’t get reported to NCCI properly. And that can greatly affect your experience modification factor, which as you should know, that is what your workers compensation insurance premiums are based on.
The second step your business must take is to ensure you have a return-to-work program. We’ve talked about that before. But a return to work program can reduce the indemnity portion of that claim. The indemnity portion is what gets paid when someone misses work because of the injury. Having a Back to Work program or light duty program where they can come in and have an alternate job responsibility while recovering from that injury keeps that indemnity payout off your worker’s compensation policy, thus reducing the claims and reducing the effect on your experience mod.
Lastly, you can have a mod analysis done to evaluate any existing claims and previous mod scores that have been assigned to your business. That’s something that we offer for free here at PrimeRisk. What we can do is actually go back through your old loss runs and payroll and evaluate them. If we find errors, which 70% of the time we do (70% of experience mon factors are incorrect), we can go back and correct those errors, have them reevaluated and reassessed through NCCI, and recover up to 3 years of overcharged premiums that may have been incorrectly rated due to an improper mod score. So we want to bring that to you today. We hope that you find that helpful. If you need to evaluate a claim if you would like to schedule a free mod analysis, please reach out to us and we can get that scheduled. All we need to do is obtain your loss runs, and currently audited payroll, and we can get the process started.
There you have it, a couple of tips we wanted to provide to help you take control of your worker’s compensation premium. Feel free to reach out. You can give us a call at 480-613-8387, You can email us at info@primeriskinsurance.com, or you can go on the website and schedule a consultation.