The MākuSafe® Difference: Part 4 – For Workers’ Compensation and Loss Prevention Departments
July 9, 2019
This piece is the fourth installment of a five-part series highlighting the impact of MākuSafe®. Read about its benefits for workers, safety managers, and industrial organizations, and stay tuned to the blog to learn about how MākuSafe® impacts other insurer core systems.
Every week, over $1 billion is paid out in workers’ compensation claims across the United States alone — and the reality is that with the right approach, many of these accidents and injuries are preventable. Unfortunately, most workers’ compensation and loss prevention departments don’t often engage with policyholders (industrial organizations) until after they receive a claim. In many instances, in fact, the only interaction insurers and businesses may have throughout the year is for the annual policy renewal or if a large claim already happened.
This is what makes MākuSafe® so revolutionary for insurers. It provides access to predictive data and enables them to engage with their policyholders to prevent claims — to make changes before those incidents happen. The key focus is on identifying hazardous occurrences and trends in policyholders operations, and then, based on this information, proactively deploying resources to mitigate risk.
Why workers’ compensation and loss prevention departments will appreciate MākuSafe®
When you consider what loss prevention experts need to move from a reactive way of working to a more proactive approach, the answer is actually quite obvious: predictive, leading indicators of risk and near miss data. To help prevent incidents from occurring, it’s essential that these experts understand the hazards and risks that workers at thee industrial organizations face on a daily basis. MākuSafe® provides this information.
Having access to near miss data allows workers’ compensation and loss prevention departments to engage with the safety leadership at policyholder organizations to mitigate risks and influence decision making. It means that insurers are more informed about the businesses they are insuring — they can see data that shows what safety leaders are doing on the floor and engage with them about it. And this engagement — and the conversations that emerge from it — is critical to supporting the creation of a safety mindset and a strong safety culture at the industrial organization.
How it makes an impact
First and foremost, the data that MākuSafe® provides helps loss prevention departments prevent accidents and injuries by predicting risks and hazards, and prescriptively deploying loss control resources or recommendations, including safety experts, industrial hygienists, ergonomists, training assets, sophisticated testing equipment, best practices, and solutions delivered at the moment of need. And the MākuSafe® platform offers these solutions automatically, without user intervention. The system identifies concerning trends and makes suggestions about action steps — the tools and resources that insurers want their policyholders to use — to mitigate the risks. This, of course, drives positive behavior changes to create a safer work atmosphere with fewer workers’ compensation claims.
The technology also supports a reduction in loss ratios, improvement in expense ratios, and an increase in profits for insurers. The explanation for this is simple: reducing the number of incidents that take place in a given industrial organization reduces losses (workers’ compensation payouts, etc.), thereby improving the loss ratio. Insurers are also able to more efficiently deploy the resources that they have on hand (noted in the previous paragraph). And while you would expect premiums to decrease, since organizations have leverage and data to help them negotiate lower rates, fewer losses means that overall profitability for workers’ compensation and loss prevention departments should increase.
Finally, as we mentioned above, MākuSafe® allows insurers to adopt a more informed, improved position. Come time for workers’ compensation renewals, the insurer is informed and knows what the data says about what’s happening on the floor of the workplace — and where the risks really lie. In addition to allowing the insurer to justify the premiums, it can open up a conversation about what is working and what needs improvement moving forward.
What MākuSafe® provides is a game changer for insurers and a revolution in workers’ compensation. It’s supporting the move from a reactive way of dealing with workplace safety based on prior claims to an approach that focuses on proactively addressing hazards and creating ongoing engagement between loss prevention departments and the industrial organization policyholders.
About MākuSafe
MākuSafe® is an Iowa-based software as a service (SaaS), data, and analytics company working to improve employee health, safety, and productivity, while reducing workers’ compensation claims and mitigating workplace risks. Our proprietary wearable technology gathers real-time environmental and motion data from workers and delivers it to the cloud platform, which uses machine learning to identify and notify safety leaders about high-risk trends in the facility. The portal also auto-records near-miss leading indicators, proactively targets loss control resources to specific conditions and occurrences, and streamlines compliance reporting.
