Change Is Coming: Workers’ Comp And COVID-19

Workers’ comp is singularly ill-equipped to handle COVID-19…but some organizations are making solid progress. The industry’s antipathy towards change, resistance to anything smacking of risk, and rejection of most anything remotely “innovative” ensures many payers, vendors, regulators and other stakeholders won’t be able to handle the fallout from COVID-19.

Industry veterans know that any change is brutally hard, slow, and fulls of fits and starts; if there’s a business that struggles mightily to innovate its workers’ comp.

Few WC organizations will adapt quickly enough to keep pace. Executives get promoted for not making mistakes, for squeezing vendors, for cutting administrative expenses — not for innovating, taking risks, being creative.

These “attributes” are exactly what organizations don’t need if they are to survive the next few months. Example — many payers are viewing COVID-19 thru the lens of yesteryear, acting as if the future will be the same as the past.

It won’t be. Covid-19 will change workers’ comp in ways that would have been incomprehensible just a week ago.