Gisele Posey
Senior Director of Workers' Compensation
Kindred Healthcare
Louisville, Ky.
Comp director had reduced costs and saved millions of dollars but she wanted to do more. So she dug and dug until she figured out how.
Question: What's the difference between Gisele Posey and a pit bull?
Answer: A pit bull eventually lets go.
In today's economy, most people would be content if the costs of whatever program they were responsible for simply didn't rise as fast as their peers' and competitors'.
Posey is not most people.
As senior director of workers' compensation for Kindred Healthcare, the Louisville, Ky.-based healthcare services company, Posey is responsible for some 53,000 employees in more than 600 facilities in 40 states.
Committed to reducing the cost of workers' comp., she instituted practices, particularly by emphasizing transitional duty, which reduced workers' compensation claims and saved the company more than $40 million in four years.
But even a successful program has trouble reducing costs year after year and last year Posey realized that her costs were rising despite a decrease in claims. True, the cost increases were less than the industry average. Posey could have been content to blame inflation and rising rates and pleased that Kindred Healthcare still was doing better than most.
She wasn't. Posey felt that the answer to why costs were increasing existed in the data. Global analysis showed a decrease in claims duration, which she felt might explain a temporary increase in claims costs.
But this change was not sufficient to explain the scope of the increase, she felt. After all, there were no catastrophic claims that would have had an impact on the results and there were few changes in individual categories of payments in medical or indemnity. Again, the data supported the fact that by payment groupings, Kindred was doing much better than its peer organizations.
Yet Posey didn't particularly care about such benchmarks. She cared only about Kindred's results. So she analyzed by pay code and by state.
Eventually, trends began to emerge. Posey saw decreases in Kindred facilities in most states but facilities in three states generated the highest workers' comp. claims volume and payments, which resulted in an increase in costs. Wondering what was happening in those states to make total costs increase, she concluded that the answer could be found by focusing on first-year costs in the top 10 highest-volume states compared to subsequent year costs in those three outliers. When those results were compared to the managed care results for the same period, the data began to show important differences.
How did she do it? The answers were found by getting team members in one room at the same time and analyzing what the comparison suggested against what the Kindred workers' comp managers were seeing in everyday claims handling.
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September 15, 2009 Copyright 2009© LRP Publications |
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