By describing her own career path from Field Case Management Nurse to Sedgwick’s first Chief Global Band Officer, Kimberly George treated AIRROC’s Chicago audience to a demonstration of her strategic views for her company and for employees throughout the insurance industry. Just don’t tell her you “fell into” a career in insurance. Her excitement for career development in the insurance industry mirrored her brand development for Sedgwick, and if she calls herself a “dinosaur”, she is a dinosaur that evolved to play a strategic role in turning a U.S. based workers’ comp TPA with $180 million in revenues into to a leading global provider of technology-enabled risk, benefits and integrated business solutions with over $5 billion in revenues. Extinction is not an option.
Her energy around “influencing” the business demonstrated her strategy for attracting “colleagues” to her company and the industry by paying attention to what is meaningful for potential candidates, by providing them opportunities to grow with cross-functional training and tailored career development plans. Her plans include thoughtful financial rewards as well, with inclusive benefit plan choices that are sensitive to people’s needs including offerings such as menopause benefits, transgender-inclusive benefits, and other support developed by listening to employees’ needs. She also cited the influence power of senior employees who contribute to the ethos of the company by sharing their “lived experiences” with younger generations.
Ms. George then gave an overview of some of Sedgwick’s cutting-edge products, referencing the “State of the Art” Line analysis that they publish (she hosts a webinar that shares these results) and described a similar publication that will be out next month created specifically for carriers. These products use Sedgwick’s claim information data developed from 10 – 15 million annual claims (depending on the year) broken out by line of business. Just a few interesting insights include:
- 18-29 year old claimants are demonstrating the highest frequency of claims and they “do not want to go back to work.” They are “slow with their medical care” which increases TPD by 2 weeks;
- Medical costs are rising, but particularly with regard to “catastrophic claims.” Providing extended care for people who might otherwise have died, but now are benefiting from the miracle of life-saving technology development in both treatment and life-care is expensive and needs additional health care talent. There are simply not enough health care workers, particularly in rural areas, to provide the assistance such patients need;
- With regard to litigation data, Sedgwick has used their data to develop models to predict the optimum points on the litigation timeline for influencing outcomes.
But her penultimate point was that wherever she goes, people are hyper-focused on customer service. To this end, she views technology as a superpower that allows people to communicate better. Sedgwick has added the ability to text and is rolling out a chat bot. Her point was that people want to talk to people, but we must digitize in this “on-demand” world to be able to communicate effectively. So, for instance, while high frequency, low value workers comp claims can be automated, an injured worker should still have the ability to chat, text or call a case manager about their claim. This marriage of technology and claims handling evolved by using claims adjusters and case nurses to develop the “prompts” and to review outcomes so that they achieved 99% accuracy in using 5 different “nurse models.” It automated processes like medical summaries, but critically, the chat bot does not have the ability to make decisions reserved for claims professionals — in other words, it was designed to “free up the claims person to do more” but does not supplant the human component.
Her ultimate point brought her presentation full circle. Her core strategy on the ongoing evolution of claims management is: to help claimants we need to help our employees, and they will, in turn, help us achieve the efficiency and outcomes we need for our business — a continuously evolving ecosystem of connection.
A video replay of this presentation can be accessed in the AIRROC On Demand Library at https://airroc.memberclicks.net/airroc-on-demand.
