To Record or Not to Record - Part I

When exercise is recommended for a musculoskeletal symptom, do you record it on your OSHA log?

By Lori Deal, PT, DPT

Part I:  Early Intervention Saves Your Bottom Line

Your focus on preventing injuries is the initial step to reducing the impact of injuries on employees and employers. Prevention can be accomplished through a variety of solutions, and we have seen results across multiple industry types: manufacturing, retail, hospitality, and more.

Methods chosen should be based on well-researched approaches to risk identification and risk solutions.  Ideally, solutions are applied before symptoms ever develop in the working population, but we all recognize that’s unrealistic.  When individuals have symptoms, those should be addressed carefully, and the employer should be comfortable with the steps taken to resolve them.  Briotix’s results have shown that Early Intervention Services resolve symptoms and prevent them from developing into injuries.

How Early Intervention impacts your bottom line...

If symptoms are addressed in their early stages, the chance to prevent an injury, or to diminish the severity of an injury, is greater.  This is where optimal value lies in helping your employees and in saving on your bottom line.  Briotix has experienced more than an 80% resolution rate in those symptoms addressed in the early stages.

Addressing and resolving symptoms early pays dividends.  As the data below depicts, an employer who began with annual Workers’ Compensation costs of $358,844 realized over $800,000 in savings after year 5 of a comprehensive approach to preventing injuries.  The annual cost of the prevention program of nearly $80,000 easily paid for itself with those savings.

Employers who implement programs to get ahead of the injury process not only are doing the right thing for their employees, they realize other benefits.  Some of those benefits are challenging to measure, such as improved employee/management relations, decreased presenteeism, and improved employee health, and some are more directly measured in dollars, including claim cost, lost work days, severity and frequency of injuries.  

Many employers are faced with an aging workforce.  As the demand of ensuring a healthy, productive, aging work force increases, solutions must rise to meet that demand.  Stopping the progression of symptoms to injury will become increasingly important.

Employers who implement programs to get ahead of the injury process not only are doing the right thing for their employees, they realize other benefits.  Some of those benefits are challenging to measure, such as improved employee/management relations, decreased presenteeism, and improved employee health, and some are more directly measured in dollars, including claim cost, lost work days, severity and frequency of injuries.  

Many employers are faced with an aging workforce.  As the demand of ensuring a healthy, productive, aging work force increases, solutions must rise to meet that demand.  Stopping the progression of symptoms to injury will become increasingly important.