Reprinted with permission from The Life Sciences Report.

Workers' compensation costs have soared over the past two decades. In 1992 alone, employers spent $62 billion on workers' comp, representing a burgeoning 2.57 percent of payroll.

Enter GuilfordPare, a newcomer to the compensation scene and founded in 1991 by president, Marcia DeWitt. Her idea was to couple traditional cost-analysis with hands-on management strategy to help employers control all aspects of workers' comp cases–legal, medical, insurance–as well as the critical step, getting employees back to work started on the premise that companies must take control of their own workers' comp costs by Expecting someone else–an insurer, a doctor, a lawyer, a safety expert or a benefits consultant–to solve your problem won t necessarily affect the bottom-line. What's different about our approach is that yes we do a traditional analysis and develop a plan, but then we work with everyone from the company CEO on down and implement a company-wide system." The objective is to empower the company itself to control and lower compensation costs.

GuilfordPare accomplishes this partly through behavioral change within the client company. Actual fraud is pretty minimal. It's just that people can work the compensation system to take advantage of it, says Deborah Cebula, senior executive with the firm, who says one strategy is to train client company super-visors to be "injury managers," a kind of in-house compensation case worker. These managers then bring employees back to work as soon as possible.

Additionally, waste in workers' comp scenarios stems from the use of inappropriate medical sources, so Guilford has networked employers and specialists in occupational injuries–all to speed the employees' healing–and cut costs.

Attitudes are important, too. "If injured workers feel company support for an early return to work, they are more likely to comply with treatment regimes and will actually heal more quickly." Cebula says sometimes companies shun injured workers, giving them motivation to abuse workers' comp.

What's the client's cost? GuilfordPare typically takes a small management fee plus a percentage of cost savings and usually works with companies from one to three years to analyze, develop a plan, train and network within a company's workers' comp program. Typically, cost savings are immediate and increase over the three years.