The Supreme Court of Alaska ruled recently that a worker’s mental health may be relevant to a workers’ compensation claim in a ruling that could reverberate around the nation.

In 2015, a woman broke her ankle when she slipped and fell in her employer’s icy parking lot. She had a complicated recovery following her surgery.

Her employer controverted benefits related to her injury claim and later requested access to her mental health records because of her pain complaints.

Complicating the matter was the fact that the employee had several preexisting conditions not directly associated with her work injury, including attention deficit disorder, anxiety and a mood disorder.

Many exchanges in courts led to the case being heard by the state’s Supreme Court, which concluded that the employee’s mental health records were potentially relevant to a defense.

The court ruled that even though the employee had not directly sought compensation related to mental health benefits, the record contained multiple references to the impact her mental health conditions had on her treatment and pain complaints, which were part of her claim for both medical treatment and disability.

At Acrometis, our tailor-made CLAIMExpert program quickly and accurately processes workers’ compensation claims to allow human teams to focus on mission critical functions and prevent overload. CLAIMExpert’s custom rule-setting also allows users to determine how to address duplicate and inappropriate claims with little or no manual handling.

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About Acrometis:

Acrometis is a leader in automated workers’ compensation claims processing platforms, founded with the simple yet powerful mission of reducing the cost of risk for our clients. Our family of rules-based, expert claims processing platforms allows for meaningful changes to an organization’s workflow that in turn leads to maximized cost savings, efficiency gains and productivity growth over the lifecycle of a claim.