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When is the last time you visited a Best Buy store? I generally make my way there once a year (about this time) for holiday gift ideas and shopping. Coincidentally, I make my yearly trek to the National Workers' Compensation and Disability Conference® & Expo also at about this time of year. But that is where the similarity ends.

The economy, however, is having the same impact on the home entertainment industry as it is on every other industry. As a result, sales are down, results are poor. I wondered, after my recent visit to Best Buy, what an electronics industry in trouble might do to excite their customers as the yearly holiday treks begin.

Then I ran across an article on CNET about this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where four of the top selling TV manufacturers--Samsung Electronics, Sony, LG Electronics and Panasonic--have again decided to utilize innovation to excite their customers by improving their viewing pleasure (the outcomes they are anticipating) and thus staving off the lagging sales.

This year's big innovation is 3-D TV, like Panasonic's 103-inch, 3-D plasma set. What a concept: innovation designed to spur the imagination, improve outcomes for customers and fix the industry's woes. If you think about it, we as home entertainment consumers expect nothing less.

WE AS COMP PROFESSIONALS

So now let's take a similar look at our workers' compensation industry. What will we experience as we make our yearly trek to the National Workers' Compensation and Disability Conference® & Expo?

Of course, no one knows for sure what we will encounter in the sessions or the exhibit hall; however, if history is our teacher, then we can expect to see the same faces (most often the high point of the yearly trek), the same topics, the same products and the same services we have seen in the past.

Our industry, just like the home entertainment industry, is impacted by the lagging economy, and we also must confront the ever-increasing cost of medical care.

Again, like the home entertainment industry, our trends suggest that the current products and services are not really improving our results. They're in fact adding to our administrative costs.

Yet, unlike other industries, we continue to accept this innovation inertia and instead treat the mergers, acquisitions and corporate name changes as progress.

Where is our flat-panel TV or iPhone that will turn the industry upside down and create the kind of change to send the old products into the corner of the exhibit hall, available only to those still willing to buy an outdated and ineffectual product or service?

Where is the product that will spur the risk manager's imagination, dramatically improve outcomes for industry stakeholders and fix the industry's woes?

Maybe our experience every year at the NWCDC is a result of our willingness to accept small incremental changes rather than demanding true innovation. In an industry dedicated to avoiding or mitigating risk, is anyone really willing to gamble on true innovators?

Just ask yourself:

-- Is squeezing an extra 1 percent or 2 percent of penetration and "phantom savings" from a bloated PPO network really going to fundamentally improve your claims outcomes, or do we need to radically rethink how we choose and support treating providers?

-- Is the answer to rising medical costs simply to pile on more broad-brushed utilization review and case management, or should we actually begin using fewer but more focused interventions?

-- Why do we just accept having to pay for the reduction of a medical provider bill to the state-mandated fee schedule when the medical provider should be billing at fee schedule in the first place?

-- Why do we continue to accept that the PBM with the highest discount for the individual pill is our best choice when the data suggests that utilization (narcotic utilization in particular) is our biggest problem?

As consumers in our private lives, we would never accept the same old products year after year. Maybe in our professional lives, we need to become better consumers with much higher expectations of our vendors, to be more open to new ideas, new products, new technologies and new services.

Challenge yourself and those you interact with at the National Workers' Compensation and Disability Conference® & Expo to become more innovative.

Maybe then we will finally get our workers' compensation "3-D home theater." (Funny glasses not included!)

MADDY BOWLING is a principal of Maddy Bowling Consulting Inc.

Read more at the WORKERSCOMP Forum^TM homepage.

November 6, 2009

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