Picture this: You’re at work and one of your colleagues slips on a wet floor and takes a nasty spill. You rush up to check on her and she’s clutching her knee. There doesn’t appear to be any bruising or lacerations but you can tell she’s in pain.
What do you do? Call 9-1-1? Rush to an urgent care clinic? Grab some ibuprofen and an ice pack?
In situations like this, having a medical professional readily available to make an accurate assessment is key to not only helping your co-worker get the right treatment but also for reducing the costs associated with unnecessary treatments.
While having an on-site healthcare professional isn’t an option for most companies, there is another option: Nurse triage services provide 24/7 telemedicine services and help companies respond to non-life-threatening injuries in the workplace.
In a recent webinar, two of Captive Resources’ (CRI) top claims experts explained how nurse triage services can help companies respond to minor injuries in the workplace and reduce medical claims costs. To watch the full webinar, check out the video below, or continue scrolling for a recap of the benefits of using nurse triage services.
Laurie Keyse, AIC — Senior Vice President, Claims, CRI
Jeff Smith, AIC — Senior Claims Services Manager, CRI
Click here to watch the webinar (skip ahead 40 seconds for the beginning of the presentation)
Anyone who has suffered a significant injury understands the uncertainty and anxiety that comes with it. Not knowing exactly how bad the injury is, what the recovery timetable will be or how much it will impact your daily routine is unnerving. Nurse triage services alleviate some of this uncertainty and instill confidence by answering employees’ initial medical questions and offering them guidance.
Employees also feel better knowing they have a resource for any follow up regarding the injury. When an employee uses a triage service, they’ll receive an incident number so if they need to call back, the nurse on the line can reference previous calls and provide the appropriate guidance.
When an injury happens at most workplaces, there’s typically little chance of having a doctor, nurse or paramedic in the general vicinity. In the absence of qualified professionals, non-medical personnel are often tasked with the initial assessment of a workplace injury. Having a nurse triage service alleviates this scenario by allowing a trained professional to provide around-the-clock expert advice without requiring companies to incur the costs of having medical personnel on-site.
The trained professionals at nurse triage services know the right questions to ask to properly assess workplace injuries and determine the appropriate level of care. To help us understand why this is important, let’s look at an example of an acute trauma, which is one of the most common types of injuries associated with workers’ compensation claims.
Acute traumas are single-incident injuries like slips and falls, cuts and bruises, etc. For our example, let’s say a co-worker cuts their hand on a table. Whereas you and your colleague are probably at a loss in trying to determine the severity of the laceration, a triage nurse will know exactly the right questions to ask to determine the appropriate medical care. The triage nurse can better assess whether it’s a minor cut that just needs a bandage, a deeper laceration that may require stitches or if there’s possible nerve or ligament damage that requires immediate professional medical attention.
Without the discerning eye of a medical professional, minor injuries can be misconstrued as serious enough to warrant visits to urgent care or even the ER. By providing more accurate initial assessments, nurse triage services can reduce the number of unnecessary visits to health care providers.
Due to the costs associated with trips to healthcare providers (more on that in a moment), this benefit is a big deal in the most normal of times. But today, amid the chaos that is 2020, reducing visits to healthcare facilities already stressed from dealing with an unprecedented pandemic is even more crucial.
Limiting unnecessary medical visits isn’t just a boon for already overworked medical professionals, there are also monetary benefits for quickly determining the appropriate healthcare for workplace injuries.
To get a better idea of the cost benefits, let’s look at one of the group captives that we work with at CRI that is still ramping up the adoption of nurse triage services. In this captive, some members utilize nurse triage services (which gives us our baseline for potential savings) but the majority of companies did not.
Figures based on average net savings of 40 percent.
Across the captive, members submitted 3,217 claims; had all of the members participated, that number would have dropped to 1,930. The bill for those 3,200-plus claims came out to almost $2.5 million; with full adoption of nurse triage services, the cost would have dropped to less than $1.8 million — a savings of nearly $700,000.
This study exposed two main sources of these savings:
Thanks to a unique loss funding model, group captive members can benefit from utilizing a nurse triage service even more than companies insured in the traditional market. Because group captive members’ premiums are calculated based on their own loss experience, driving down loss frequency and severity can not only translate to reduced future premiums, but also present significant opportunities for underwriting profit, which is returned to the members as dividends. Traditional market insureds may experience the same benefits from nurse triage services, however, because traditional insurers use industry data and state rates to determine premiums, the true savings potential is far less than what group captives offer their members.