The Challenge

Assuring a good "big picture" outcome for a working person with a health-related life and employment disruption is not in any professional’s job description today.  With rare exceptions, no professional feels responsible for making sure a person’s recovery is as complete and rapid as possible, and that the process that determines whether, when and how someone will stay at work and return to work is successfully conducted.

Instead, this important task typically defaults to the person with the health problem, who is usually the least qualified to carry them out, given the complexity of today’s health, disability benefits and workers’ compensation systems.

As a result, some people fall through this gap in the social fabric and end up with sub-par outcomes that could have been avoided.  Insurers say privately that many of their highest cost cases began as common health conditions, ones that most people can find a way to live with.  Under certain circumstances, they slowly transform into "creeping catastrophes."

In our view, something is wrong whenever a working person dealing with an illness, injury or other health condition:

• remains in the "sick role" longer than is medically required due to ineffective or disjointed medical care, or inattention to the psychosocial, interpersonal, environmental, social, or motivational issues that are keeping them there; and
• sits home instead of working for weeks, months or years for reasons that are fundamentally non-medical, like poor communication, bureaucratic processes, and discretionary decisions by people who play significant roles in the situation but aren’t focused on or committed to helping them get their life back on track.