Using claims and loss data can be a helpful tool in reducing your future workers compensation losses. Two types of forms that are readily available are your OSHA logs and your Loss Runs or Claims Reports from your Insurance Carrier.  

If you maintain your OSHA log year round, as required, it’s a great tool to provide you with information on where your claims are coming from.  It will give you dates, job titles, types of injuries, and days away from work.   The OSHA 301 will contain even more detailed information.  You can combine this with the Insurance company loss runs to obtain a good amount of information to track and trend.  I recommend an accident investigation form be used that contains all the needed information to complete all of your forms after an injury.   There are also several online OSHA tracking programs such as OSHATrac.com  and OSHA300Online.com  that will track your injuries and give various reports. 

If you have more than a few small claims, Insurance Carrier loss runs should be provided to you either quarterly or monthly.  The loss runs can be very basic so I would recommend asking the broker or carrier what reports are available.  Some will have very detailed reports available if you ask.  They will show many types of graphs and trends.  If your broker makes it hard for you to obtain this information, you could have the wrong broker.   In addition to trending, the loss runs will give you good information on what’s going on with the claim since the last loss run.  Look for changes in numbers such as paid (amounts already paid on a claim) and reserved (estimates of amounts expected to be paid on the claim) on all open claims.  We will discuss this in detail in another article.  

This information should be reviewed regularly by the CEO, HR Department, Safety Department, and Safety Committee.  They should all be looking at ways to improve your safety and prevent losses in the future by noticing trends.  An example might be that all claims in the certain department were from employees there under 1 year.  This would mean that they lack proper training and supervision and the training program could be altered to improve this situation.    

In addition to looking at past claims to identify a possible future claim, the claims information can be used for actuarial analysis to predict future losses.  This is very important if you are under a partially self funded plan or in a captive because it will allow you to predict your claims numbers in the future.  The more data that is available, the better the analysis will be.  Some auditors may request or require this information when performing your annual audit.