Client Stewardship can be a critical element of any well-managed risk management program. At best, it can illuminate areas of opportunity, generate targeted recommended actions for improvement, and quantify anticipated financial benefit from capitalizing on those opportunities. Yet sometimes, Stewardship can mean wasted opportunities, where clients are given a “report of the news” rather than targeted recommendations that tie back to objectives. 

At GB, we’ve enhanced our Stewardship in 2022, continuing to build out a robust, industry-leading approach to ensure that the end product generates meaningful insights and actions.

One of our key goals in enhancing our Stewardship approach was to reorient around the objectives we share with our clients—the outcomes that matter most. Rather than focusing solely on the metrics, we have developed shared objectives, with the intent of driving actionable insights for our clients and holistically assessing the health of our clients’ programs to improve claim outcomes.

  • Partner to create the safest possible work environment. At the outset, we believe we have an opportunity to partner with our clients to create a safe work environment. There are two critical components to safety: how many claims there are and how complex those claims are. This area of program health can be addressed through loss-control services.  
  • Minimize the severity of injury immediately following an accident. We recognize accidents are going to happen, but there are things we can do to minimize the injury severity, and that starts with reporting the claim as quickly as possible. We have tools such as PC365 to get the claims reported quickly and to get the injured worker access to proper care as soon as possible.  
  • Work closely to reserve consistently. Throughout the life of the claim, we work with our clients to reserve consistently, so clients and actuaries can accurately assess each claim’s financial impact. Waypoint decision-support tools help our resolution managers assess and set reserves quickly and accurately. 
  • Recover claimant health as quickly as possible. When an employee is hurt, our goal is always to return him or her to health. Getting injured workers back to health is simply the right thing to do, and it aligns with GB’s social purpose. GB’s mission is not just about minimizing cost; we also help put people’s lives back together. This means getting the injured worker to the right providers and ensuring they receive the right treatment and prescriptions, all in a timely manner.  
  • Return injured workers to work as quickly as possible. Beyond getting them back to health, our goal is to return employees to work and resolve the claim. In the event that we can’t return employees to full duty, we work to find alternative roles or resolve the claim through settlement.    
  • Complete the above as cost-effectively as possible. Cost is no doubt important, but it’s not listed as the top objective because cost shouldn’t dominate the conversation. That being said, each objective should be delivered in a cost-effective way. For example, expenses from nurse case management may not result in positive claim outcomes if nurses are being assigned to all claims. When the assignment is done in a strategic way, we’ve been able to demonstrate better health, return-to-work, and cost outcomes on claims that stood to benefit the most from the service.  
  • Recover funds from third parties to pay the claim. Along with cost-effectiveness, we also strive to recover funds for our clients from third parties where possible. Waypoint decision-support tools help to identify subrogation opportunities for our centralized team focused on recovering funds.  

From a solid foundation of having the right objectives (and metrics against those objectives), we believe service excellence is paramount to delivering actionable insights. To us, that means a Stewardship process that is not a one-and-done meeting but rather a yearlong engagement. It means having the technology and tools to deliver customization through interactive, dynamic dashboards, not merely static reporting. And of course, it also means bringing in the right experts from across the organization, at the right time, to aid in decision-making, whether that be our risk-control team, managed care consultants, or claims specialists.  

To be sure, the quality of insights is one of the most important aspects of Stewardship. To generate richer, more meaningful insights, we believe a critical ingredient is precise benchmarking. We developed SMART benchmarking (Severity Mix Adjusted Rating Technique) in 2016 to ensure that our clients have the most apples-to-apples benchmarking of claims outcomes in our industry. Using an algorithmically derived approach, whereby we match the individual complexity of each of our clients’ claims to hundreds of other like-kind claims, helps give clarity on where to focus efforts toward program improvement. In parallel to precise benchmarking, trending analysis provides transparency into how a client’s performance varies over time, whether shown in “triangle” form or for multiple years at the same maturity (for example, at 12 months). We’ve organized our Stewardship with an overall executive level scorecard—tied to metrics pertaining to our shared objectives—that measures current year activity against SMART benchmarks and historical experience. We then provide a concise package of slides that follow immediately to give a good, high-level understanding of each of the metrics on our overall objectives. From there, we provide a richly detailed appendix, which allows our team and our client services colleagues to drill down to root cause. 

Beyond opportunity identification, our mission is to identify root cause beyond the “what.” For example, if a client sees a rise in medical costs, we may pinpoint that the rise is due to increased nurse case management spend while other drivers have remained relatively constant. Further, as we compare this client’s case management utilization to GB’s SMART benchmark and see that the client is over-utilizing field case managers, we’d make a targeted recommendation to recalibrate his or her case management utilization through our decision support–guided approach to case management, called Waypoint Clinical Guidance.  

Ultimately, our goal is to deliver targeted recommendations and action items with accountable owners so that we can continue to improve programs. Our clients shouldn’t have to dig through the weeds to find solutions—that’s part and parcel of what makes a Stewardship effective.  

To learn more about our enhanced Stewardship process, please reach out to Dan Link at Daniel_link@gbtpa.com.

Disclaimer: The information contained herein is offered as risk and claims management industry guidance and provided as an overview of current market risks and available programs and is intended for discussion purposes only. This publication is not intended to offer legal advice or client-specific risk management advice. General descriptions contained herein do not include complete definitions, terms, and/or conditions, and should not be relied on for claims management interpretation. Actual claims and risk management policies must always be consulted for full coverage details and analysis. Copyright © 2021 Gallagher Bassett Services, Inc.