Riskonnect

Riskonnect:

Riskonnect was founded in 2007 with the objective of providing software to empower organizations with the ability to anticipate, manage, and respond in real time to strategic and operational risks across the extended enterprise.
Riskonnect has more than 1,400 employees serving over 2,700 customers in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
Riskonnect’s global headquarters is in Atlanta with regional offices in London, India, Singapore, and Australia.

IAIABC: How does your organization serve the workers’ compensation industry?

Riskonnect:

Riskonnect provides software to streamline the workers' compensation claims process from intake to final settlement.
Riskonnect’s Return-to-Work application manages employee return-to-work programs using insights from the Official Disability Guidelines (ODG) to get ill or injured employees back to work safely and swiftly.
Riskonnect sees our role as helping organizations and claims leaders to resolve even the most complex workers' compensation claims quickly, easily, and fairly.

IAIABC: What do you see as some of the major challenges the industry is facing, and how can we as a community address them?

Riskonnect:

The biggest challenge facing the industry is increasing claims costs. The frequency of claims remains stable, even declining, but severity is rising, due in part to rising fraud and increasing litigation rates. The IAIABC community should come together with other organizations, such as the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, to combat organized provider fraud. Plus, work with State jurisdictions to limit or prevent the growing trend of third-party litigation financing.
Another challenge facing the industry is the growing number of injured workers who are unable to return to work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that nearly 40% of injured workers have been on the job for less than a year. I think the IAIABC community can collaborate to provide better job safety programs to prevent accidents. Plus, tools to identify long-term injuries earlier and help injured workers return to work sooner.

IAIABC: Are there any projects/programs/initiatives going on at your organization that you are particularly excited or enthusiastic about?

Riskonnect:

Riskonnect has developed a series of predictive models to identify claims anomalies and outliers to reduce claims costs. These include models for:
- Litigation propensity to spot costly litigated claims early, identify plaintiff attorney patterns, and take preventive action.
- Claims duration to forecast average days to closure with upper and lower percentile values. Providing pre- and post-treatment metrics to measure cost savings.
- Claims reserving to calculate the estimated incurred costs – total, medical, indemnity, and expense – of each claim. Rescoring in real time whenever new data is added to the claim file.
Riskonnect is working on improving the intake and first report on injury (FROI) process. Applying AI to read unstructured injury description fields to automatically populate the appropriate claims data. Ultimately, enabling an injured employee to verbally describe the injury in any language, using any device, and ensuring an accurate FROI.

IAIABC: What's an interesting fact about your organization that most people don't know?

Riskonnect:

A lot of the people at Riskonnect used to do the job it supports. Our team came from risk management, claims adjusting, safety, and TPA roles, and many still hold designations like ARM, CPCU, and CSP. That shapes the product in small, practical ways such as the fields an adjuster actually needs on first notice, how a safety manager logs a near miss from the floor, what a state EDI edit really means for the person fixing it. We build for the practitioner because a lot of us were one.

IAIABC: Why is your organization a member of the IAIABC? What would you tell others about the benefits of membership?

Riskonnect:

Riskonnect is a member of the IAIABC because it has helped us understand the complexities of workers’ compensation claims and return-to-work programs. Enabling us to develop new tools that not only aid employees in recovering from injury but also identify trends that can prevent future incidents.
Working with IAIABC has been invaluable to Riskonnect. Employee safety should be the primary objective for any organization, and the best practices and collaboration that the IAIABC provides help tackle the complex issues impacting workers' compensation.