Employees missing work due to illness represents a concern to numerous companies. The goal of this article is to challenge the traditional, non-integrated approach to the issue, and suggest that coordination among stakeholders has the potential to mitigate the negative impact of illness-related worker absence within organizations. At MDS, we believe that there is meaningful room to add value in this space.

In general, we can state that companies rely on three stakeholders for management of employee health/illness: (i) Occupational Medicine Services (OM) — mandatory, (ii) Workers’ Compensation Insurance (WC) — mandatory, and (iii) Health Insurance and National Health Service (NHS) — the former being optional, as a complement to the NHS.

Occupational Medicine is of strategic importance to the management of worker absence. Legally mandatory as it is, OM ensures that employees undergo admittance examination as well as periodic and occasional assessments.

These interactions provide an opportunity for prevention and identification of health issues and subsequent referral. It is key that doctors have the ability to refer an employee, in an uncomplicated manner, to a network of health professionals who can manage their case (e.g. through access to a scheduling platform for appointments and testing). Oftentimes, when an employee is given a mere suggestion and the burden of looking for, and making an appointment falls on the employee, “referrals” end up not going anywhere.

Considering that access to the NHS is increasingly difficult, health insurance has become ever more significant to ensuring health care access. This is where availability to support employees as they navigate these paths, ensuring adequate handover between entities (a concierge service, if you will), as an added-value service with growth potential.

Furthermore, OM is critical to the assignment of medical restrictions and management of post-illness return to work. Concerning work absence lasting over 30 days, owing to non-work-related illness or workplace accident, a medical examination outside the regular schedule is mandatory.

At times, especially where a workplace accident has occurred, an occupational medicine provider and an employee may disagree on (total or partial) return to the workplace and they have the right to appeal the decision. In such cases, it is useful to have the ability to make one's case before the clinical directors of the insurer responsible for OM so that specific cases get reassessed in a timely manner. This channel between OM and the OM insurance company is usually maintained via email, making it an impersonal and sometimes lengthy process. Except for a few large organizations with adequate internal structures to sustain a direct relationship with the insurer’s clinical team, there is room for a broker and their clinical team to work as liaison between company and insurer, expediting resolution of such cases. Our experience in this domain confirms the need and benefit to companies.

In cases where a claim is refused for legal reasons (no causality, pre-existing condition, decision on discharge, etc.) and an employee still needs medical care, they are referred to the NHS. As mentioned earlier, this is not a simple process, and NHS response times drag out case resolution, to the detriment of all those involved. This is where another major opportunity arises with regard to proactive referral and management impacting work absence reduction.

The following argument with pursue the argument laid out above, focusing on health data from several domains — Occupational Medicine, Occupational Accidents, Health Insurance, and Medical Leave — and how these could be integrated in keeping with data protection legislation, to build a holistic overview of the company’s health profile and illness-related work absence.