Health Strategy Associates has published their findings of their survey, “The Impact of COVID-19 on Workers’ Compensation”. They interviewed 15 workers’ compensation insurance carriers, third-party payers, government entities, and other self-insured employers over a seven-day period ending April 6th.
The major impacts that were noted were:
- Declining payrolls
- Delayed return to work
- More death claims among healthcare workers and first responders
- Inability of workers’ comp patients to access needed care
- Rapid increase in demand for telemedicine and related services
- Confusion over which COVID-19-related claims should be accepted and underlying rules and standards to make that judgment
- Need to adapt to a massive shift from injury-based to disease-based claims (very different and more complex decision process regarding claim acceptance)
- Dealing with WFH claims
- Long-term impact on actuarial data and associated projections
According to the survey, most payers have moved quickly to shift workers to working from home and have ramped up telehealth.
A large payer was able to move thousands of workers out of multiple offices and into home offices in a week. This involved workers moving equipment like desktop computers and monitors, help from the IT department to make sure the computers were secure and had access to centralized databases, and other help from management to ensure claims handling requirements and standards were maintained.
In workers’ comp, telemedicine had not been widely utilized so far but recently payers have been rapidly adopting the technology. Payers who were already using the technology had an easier time ramping up access to care, those who were only in the testing/evaluation phase found themselves struggling to keep up.
Respondents said on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being extremely significant), COVID-19 will have an impact of 4.4 on the industry. Many stated they expect an increase in death claims and delayed return to work as the biggest impacts. Half the respondents had “many” COVID-19 claims filed, about a quarter said they had “several”. Two had not yet seen claims filed.
Most respondents had not yet spent much time on pharmaceutical issues related to the virus, some were working on changes to their formularies.
The single biggest concern respondents had was mainly the unknown. We don’t really know how long it will last or what the overall impact on jobs or employment will be, so it’s hard to know how the workers’ comp system will need to respond.
The takeaways from the survey were that organizations who adopt flexibility and a willingness to embrace change to procedures and policies could fare better in this new situation.
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