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Preventing Medically-Unnecessary Disability Through Internet-based Training and Collaboration
Webility is devoted to helping reduce
medically-unnecessary disability days. This needless time
lost from work frequently reduces the quality of life for affected
employees, and costs employers and
insurers billions of dollars annually in workers compensation,
disability and sick leave benefits, and administrative
costs. The indirect costs of medically-unnecessary disability -- emotional
upset, family and life disruption, workplace disruption, lost productivity, career
loss -- are much larger than the the
direct costs.
Three major causes of medically-unnecessary
disability days need attention. These are:
- Physician skill in disability prevention, mitigation and management.
- Employer / insurer effectiveness at intervening on non-medical issues.
- Quasi-medical communications between medical offices and employers/insurers.
Webility has initiatives underway in each of these areas, all intended to improve the working relationship
between medical offices and employers (or their insurers) as they confront medical conditions that affect employed
patients' ability to work.
The goal of all these initiatives is to allow more individuals with medical conditions to avoid needless disability,
so they can remain productively at work or return to work both promptly and safely.
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Train America's treating physicians in the basics of their role
in disability prevention. Webility's web-based "primer" in disability prevention and management for physicians (and other healthcare and benefits professionals) is now available for spring 2001 programs.
Physicians can take the course on-line anywhere they have Internet access.
The basic course is accredited for 1.5 hours of continuing medical education (CME) credit by the American College of Occupational and Environmental
Medicine, and supplementary materials provide an additional
CME hour. Additional training modules are being
developed to address more advanced topics.
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Consult with employers, insurers, and healthcare provider organizations to
help them strengthen their mutual working relationships in the area of disability management.
Webility provides strategic and operational consulting to refine their view of these relationships,
to re-engineer their workflow
for quasi-medical communication, and to develop clinical and programmatic interventions
that address key non-medical issues driving disability case outcomes.
The end result of our involvement is improved service quality, increased efficiency, and increased revenues
/ profitability.
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Standardize, streamline, and enrich the flow of quasi-medical communications between
medical offices and business/industry.
This service, now in development, will use the Internet to automate and enrich quasi-medical communications between doctors and employers / insurers.
Currently, these communications are unautomated, inefficient, non-standardized, and information-poor.
Delay and redundancy are the rule, not the exception. These communications are an administrative annoyance to doctors and a bottleneck in the benefits management process.
Please contact us if you
are interested in learning more.
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