Rehab Select Blog

Nurse case managers are educators and motivators who work with injured employees to help them understand their medical conditions, get the necessary treatments promptly, and navigate the complex healthcare system. 

Engaging a nurse case manager on a claim can reduce medical and indemnity costs by an average of $6,100, resulting in an 8:1 ROI. But how can you deliver the best outcomes to keep adjustors returning to use your services? 

A workers’ comp injury begins a long journey, starting with initial treatment and ideally ending with a return to work. Getting the patient to that successful outcome is a team effort, and nurse case managers play a critical role in keeping that team together. 

Cost-effectiveness is only one of the nurse case manager’s goals for treatment, but it is an important one. After all, keeping total costs down is an indicator that the patient is progressing through treatment. The faster an employee can reach MMI and return to work, the lower the costs of a workers' comp injury.  

The goal is not to rush rehabilitation at the cost of a full recovery, potentially increasing the risk of re-injury. Instead, nurse case managers and providers must design programs that restore functional capacity completely. Even so, keeping efficiency in mind benefits everyone involved. 

Nurse case managers play a critical role in optimizing work injury treatment outcomes, shortening the time it takes for a patient to return to work while lowering medical expenses. The proof is in the pudding: Many insurance companies work with nurse case managers to lower costs, improve outcomes, and increase patient satisfaction. 

Case managers help injured employees navigate the healthcare system and ensure effective coordination among the employer, insurance adjuster, and rehab care team — from assessing the injury and planning the rehab to delivering workers' comp occupational therapy and evaluating the outcomes. 

Let's look at the key characteristics of effective case management and how a nurse case manager can ensure high-quality workers' compensation rehabilitation for patients.  

When someone is injured at work, it can disrupt their whole life. While the physical injury can take a toll, it can also impact someone both mentally and emotionally.

For patients who were injured on the job, they're typically required to attend therapy in order to return to a normal way of life as well as work, if possible. Rehab Select offers a physiatrist-led program with aggressive wound care therapy, that ultimately helps patients heal and return to work as soon as possible.

Workers comp physical therapy is a mode of treatment that works to improve recoveries and overall functional outcomes after a workplace injury. An effective, responsive and cost-efficient workers comp physical therapy program can be helpful in a number of ways during the recovery process to all involved parties, including the injured worker, their employer and the employer’s workers comp insurance provider.

Workers’ compensation, or workman’s comp, is a mandatory insurance program that is designed to ensure that workers who experience on-the-job injuries or job-related illnesses are compensated for medical care, lost wages, and any type of long term disability resulting from these incidents.

Workers’ compensation provides workers with benefits when they suffer a work related injury or illness. For an injury that involves lost work time, those benefits generally include some compensation for lost wages, as well as medical benefits.

Many people who qualify for workers comp benefits after an injury may also be covered by a long term disability policy that also offers some compensation for lost wages for injured workers. If you are one of them, you may want to know if claiming your long term disability benefits will affect your workers’ compensation. Can you collect from both?

Case managers are being employed in a growing number of work comp injury cases these days, and may be assigned to them by insurance carriers, self-insured employers or third party administrators.

Their greater presence in the claims process has led many who have had little experience with these professionals to become curious about just what their role is in the claims management process. Here we'll provide a general outline of that role.

While catastrophic claims amount to only 10 percent of overall workers' compensation injury claims, they are arguably the most important claims in terms of the importance of proper management.

Workplace injuries create frustrating issues for all involved. For the injured worker, there is the pain and trauma involved in being injured on the job, as well as the financial uncertainty that arises when temporary or permanent disability results from those injuries.