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| Peter Rousmaniere | ||||||||||||||
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2005-11-01 A More Dangerous Place In a complete reversal, some American work has recently gotten more dangerous. Terrorists bring the battlefield to civilians here, the Pentagon brings civilians to battlefields there. Natural disasters are kicking more sand in our eyes. Invisibly inked into more job descriptions is a new function: crisis responder. MORE 2005-10-15 A Mirror to Your Driving We were in the basement garage of a big insurer. Every parking space was full. We raced the car down narrow lanes, braked sharply, swerved at tight corners. The driver of this manic jitterbug in my Mazda was a senior executive of the insurer, who a chance observer might surmise had lost his marbles. Luckily there were no pedestrians to see us or be run over. Nor did there appear to be surveillance cameras on the walls. The camera, as it happened, was in the car. MORE 2005-10-01 What Katrina Tells Us About TRIA Without delay the country needs to learn from Katrina. Because it is up for renewal by year's end, let's look at how the federal Terrorism Risk Insurance Act could be strengthened. Katrina has elements of a man-made disaster: imperfect long-term planning, seriously flawed short-term preparation, and fouled up immediate response. Sadly, these same perils flow through TRIA. MORE 2005-09-15 Uplifting Tales of Innovation Nursing-home jobs involve lifting and moving of residents. This leads to worker injuries, high staff turnover and lower productivity. "No lift" or "low lift" devices have been marketed for years. Most nursing-home administrators do not buy the devices, and even then, many employees don't use them. Four barriers have blocked wide acceptance of this technology: lack of innovation budgets, staff resistance, external criticism and failure to acknowledge gained benefits. MORE 2005-09-01 W.'s Memo for the Fall White House Interoffice Memorandum. Eyes Only. MORE 2005-08-01 Navigating the Rocks of Dim California passed a law in 2003 that endorsed treatment guidelines to govern health care for injured workers. This provision was further advanced in the large-scale reform package SB 899, passed in 2004. The nationwide consequences of this reform could be huge. It will be important to watch how the initial, fragile set of guidelines is strengthened in the next year. MORE 2005-06-01 Easier, Faster, Cheaper, Better Here are more glad and disruptive tidings about how information technology has begun to change how we manage work injury risk. Key words: easier, faster, cheaper and most importantly, better. Driving these advances of course is information technology, or IT. Some have said that the performance-to-cost ratio of IT nationwide has been improving 30 percent a year for a long time. In the '90s we invested heavily in new client/server systems and databases. Today we are investing in Internet-based systems. MORE 2005-05-01 A Challenge for RIMS In case you hadn't noticed, a great shift in work-related impairment is under way. Career-ending work disability is an increasingly obsolete concept. But careers accompanied by any health risk, ironically, have become increasingly common. MORE 2005-04-15 A Painful Circus In November 2000, a mental health patient assaulted a 35-year-old California social worker. This is her story of descent into chronic pain hell and her recovery, if not to heaven, then at least to purgatory. This real case, disguised here using the pseudonym Jane Doe, was related to me by Tom Schell of Paradigm Health. When you reach the end of this column, think of whether you would have acted differently. MORE 2005-04-01 10 Threads of Huerta's Shroud Why are Hispanic workers dying on the job at a rate much higher than other workers? On average, every calendar day marks another Hispanic work-related death that confirms this pattern. There are, it turns out, a crowd of culprits. MORE 2005-03-01 Moving in Opposite Directions Last November, I spent six days in workers' comp conferences where I engaged in dozens of conversations and attended scores of product demonstrations. I woke up bleary-eyed on the last day with this disquieting notion. The missing information about claims is becoming in the eyes of many data vendors a very big black hole. As the leading vendors fill the hole, its existence will become more painfully obvious to industry participants who don't. MORE 2005-02-01 In the Name of the Father I hope you like snappy mnemonics as I am about to share one with you. A few years ago, I searched about for a simple means to summarize key tasks in injury prevention and recovery. I stubbed my mental toe upon the word "PADRE,"--meaning father in Spanish. MORE
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