Pandemic’s Bolstered Claims Technology - Shield Insurance Agency Blog

Claims Technology Bolstered by the Pandemic

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Workers Expect Savvy Claims Technology: Here’s How the Pandemic’s Bolstered Claims Technology During Uncertain Times

The COVID-19 pandemic sped up the adoption of claims technology, but many tools were already in place and poised for growth.

Even apart from the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 was a significant year. According to the NOAA, 22 separate weather events including severe storms, wildfires, and cyclones totaled $95 billion in damages.

While many types of insurance bear the brunt of these disasters, workers’ compensation carriers, tasked with critical care needs that affect workers and their families, need special strategies to deliver care when catastrophe strikes.

For many organizations, these strategies utilize technology, built-in redundancies, and, stepped-up conveniences like a direct deposit to ensure continuity of care, no matter the weather.

“We have to be ready for it all — hurricanes, floods, fires,” said Mark Bilger, CIO of One Call.

“In general, disaster recovery and business continuity are a staple of well-run IT management for any organization. Specifically, in claims and insurance, it’s heightened because of the critical care for injured workers.”

Especially in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, workers’ comp claims teams were challenged with the immediate expansion of remote work, resulting in necessary changes that are likely to endure even after the pandemic concludes.

“Before work from home, One Call had a few concentrated contact centers,” Bilger said.

“After working from home, we look a lot more like the internet. We’re dispersed and we had to make major upgrades to our virtual private network, essentially 10-fold. We went from 1 gigabit to 10 gigabit capacity. We strengthened our endpoint protections and it went from firewalls in our locations to everybody’s home becoming the One Call network.”

Claims Technology

This growth in gigabit capacity is not isolated to the workers’ comp industry; reports indicate that pandemic-related growth has resulted in an estimated global wireless gigabit market size of $19 million in 2021 and is projected to reach $70 million by 2026.

In tandem with the global wireless market, gigabit size is the growth of cloud computing. Gartner forecasted 18.4% growth in a 2020 report to a total of $304.9 billion, noting that “the proportion of IT spending that is shifting to the cloud will accelerate in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, with cloud projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020.”

Workers Expect Claims Technology

Expectations have been set by regulation and digitization in the 21st Century that even in the wake of a natural disaster, services will continue.

“One of the technology solutions that we have had for a few years but that we pushed during COVID and any other type of catastrophic event is our claimant app, MyCare,” said Michael Jamason, SVP, of business operations at CorVel.

“It gives the injured worker the ability to manage their pharmacy information, phone numbers for points of contact regarding their claim, information about payments being made to their accounts, and they can even establish their direct deposit in the app.”

Pharmacy information is especially important during a disaster when medications are destroyed due to property damage or lost in an evacuation.

“We were able to utilize our partnership with our PBM to allow people to get early refills, and with mail order, we were able to even change the amounts of medication given,” said Melissa Burke, head of managed care and clinical, AmTrust.

“We expanded into other needs like telemedicine, ensuring that we have different types of providers available. We were able to expand that and ensure access in all of our states where allowed by regulatory governance, including digital doctor networks. Something important there too is transitioning injured employees. Typically a telehealth solution would be either on the front end or the back end of a claim. We wanted to make sure that we could go back and forth depending on the state of the catastrophe,” Burke added.

Indeed, telemedicine expansion is at the forefront of many workers’ comp claims organizations’ radar. According to Mitchell’s “The Future of Technology in Work Comp 2020” industry survey, “many respondents believe that telemedicine will have the biggest impact on the industry within the next five years (32%), followed closely by artificial intelligence (30%) and predictive analytics (20%).”

The survey was conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic, which likely would have boosted telemedicine’s impact on the results due to significant expansions.

For many industry leaders though, the specific technological solution is not as significant as the strategy behind the solutions. “We have to ensure continuity of care and benefits,” said Michele Tucker, CorVel’s VP of EC operations.

“Any interruption — whether it’s a natural disaster or anything else — impacts many lives and families. We’ve been doing some regular testing with payments and system recovery so redundancy is set up, and if we have an office impacted, our system allows for immediate replication and the pickup of services by another office.”

Growth Brings Security Risks

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The Year of Mergers and Acquisitions - Shield Insurance Agency Blog

The year of Mergers and Acquisitions

The year of Mergers and Acquisitions: Navigating risk in a volatile market

In 2020, companies faced unprecedented risk as they tried to maintain business continuity while keeping their employees safe. But many experts didn’t anticipate one new pandemic-era risk trend: the rise of mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

Although mergers and acquisitions activity slowed down for the first half of 2020, it rapidly picked up steam in the second half of the year and is projected to grow even more in 2021. Follow along to learn more about how this flurry of M&A transactions is shifting the risk landscape—and what companies can do about it.

Mergers and Acquisitions: Slow down to speed up

After the pandemic hit in March 2020, companies anticipating another recession tightened their belts and focused on liquidity. As a result, M&A activity slowed down considerably—and experts predicted that the trend would last through the end of the year. But in the second half of 2020, historically low interest rates fed the mergers and acquisitions market. As Morgan Stanley reports, in the last quarter alone, there were 1,250 M&A deals globally, totaling over $1 trillion.

For the most part, these deals took place in industries that were the least impacted by Covid-19. Technology, healthcare, and financial services saw the most activity, whereas industrials and real estate fell well below historical transaction volumes. But many financial experts anticipate those harder hit sectors will rebound in 2021, now that there’s a clearer outlook on the market. With M&A volumes hitting their highest quarterly values in years despite the economic impact of the pandemic, it’s clear that these deals will continue to be a foundational part of business growth.:

Mergers and Acquisitions: SPACs take the lead

Mergers and Acquisitions: Contributing to this contentious economic landscape are special purpose acquisition companies or SPACs. Sometimes called “blank check companies,” these businesses are explicitly created to take other companies public, allowing businesses to avoid the traditional IPO process. SPACs don’t form with a specific merger in mind—instead, investors pool money and then have two years to find a privately held company to acquire.

According to David Perez, a chief underwriting officer of Global Risk Solutions at Liberty Mutual Insurance, the uncertainty of these transactions increases insurance risk.

“From an insurance perspective, you’re underwriting the company raising the capital, but you don’t always know what company they’ll acquire. That leaves a wide range of potential risks to contend with,” he says.

Because this area of the market is entirely speculative, it can lead to huge swings in stock values. Perez notes that some companies see “swings of 1,000 points from month to month.” That kind of volatility was formerly unheard of—and it is a major contributing factor to the hardening D&O insurance market.

Weathering the hard market

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More Cities Are Handling People Cash - Shield Insurance Agency Blog

More Cities Are Handing People Cash

More Cities Are Handing People Cash With No Strings Attached. Here’s Why

The idea of handing people cash without conditions once seemed radical. But the pandemic has changed that.

The spotlight on income inequality has pushed the concept of a guaranteed income into the mainstream. In recent months, nearly two dozen American cities have signed on. Los Angeles may soon become the largest U.S. city to try it. It’s considering a plan to provide $1,000 a month to at least 1,000 households.

The pandemic hit America’s lowest-wage workers hard: people working in restaurants, hotels, and shops. A recent study shows poverty has risen sharply.

“Unfortunately, without COVID and without the pandemic and the economic downturn, I don’t know if we would be having the conversations with the intensity that we are regarding guaranteed income,” said Aisha Nyandoro, executive director of Springboard to Opportunities, home to a guaranteed income project in Jackson, Miss. “But we are. So we’ll take it.”

Nyandoro’s program started in 2018, way before the pandemic. It targeted moms like Tia Cunningham, who got a call from Springboard to Opportunities’ Magnolia Mother’s Trust three years ago offering her “a late Christmas present.”

Cunningham says she was surprised and happy when she was selected to receive $1,000 each month for a year — cash payments with no strings attached. The mother of three says the money got her out of subsidized housing and helped her save for a down payment on a house, which she moved into in 2019. When the pandemic hit, she had some security.

“I put it to good use. I did a whole lot,” Cunningham said.

The Jackson, Miss., project started with just 20 moms. Others that have followed are larger but have similarly been funded by philanthropists. The project in Los Angeles stands out because it would use public money.

But advocates have even more ambitious plans. They want this fringe concept to go universal in the form of a guaranteed payment to every American family. Andrew Yang, a Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, made it the centerpiece of his last campaign — for president.

“I want to give every American $1,000 a month,” he said at a Democratic primary debate last February.

Many credit Yang with helping bring the idea into the mainstream.

“He did a really good job of getting the idea out there and getting people very interested in it,” said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at The Brookings Institution.

In the mid-1990s, Sawhill served on President Bill Clinton’s welfare task force. She sees this current push for guaranteed income as a reaction to policies that largely ended welfare under Clinton. Those policies cut off cash payments to people who didn’t have jobs, no matter how poor they were, with the idea of incentivizing work.

As a task force member, Sawhill traveled the country to meet with recipients.

“One of the things that surprised me is that a lot of welfare moms don’t like welfare,” Sawhill said. “It’s not their first choice. They’d much rather be working.”

For years before the welfare reform of 1996, critics stigmatized the people who received it, according to Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and economics faculty director at the California Policy Lab.

“Much of the motivation for welfare reform was a sense that there were a lot of people who could work but weren’t working because they preferred to stay on welfare,” Rothstein said.

One of the enduring examples has been the so-called “welfare queen” trope, popularized by conservatives.

“In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record,” Ronald Reagan said in a radio address in 1976, four years before he ascended to the White House. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans benefits for four, nonexistent, deceased veterans’ husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”

More than four decades later, poverty has endured. Mayors from Richmond, Va., to Oakland, Calif., see guaranteed income projects as a way to address it. A recent project in Stockton, Calif., challenged the belief that free money discouraged work. After a year, it showed full-time employment rose 12 percentage points among recipients. A lot of it went toward paying for food and bills, a study by the project’s organizers found.

“I think these experiments are great because they’re giving money to people who are often quite poor and need the money,” said Rothstein. But he adds that pilot projects around the country have been relatively small in scope. Stockton’s pilot included 125 people and ran for two years.

“I think that they’re really limited in what we can learn from them,” Rothstein said.

Conservative critics agree.

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6 Morning Habits stressing You Out - Shield Insurance Agency Blog

6 Morning Habits Stressing You Out

6 Morning Habits That Seem Healthy But Are Secretly Stressing You Out

By Seraphina Seow | 05/21/2021 05:45am EDT | Huffpost.com

While these morning habits can be beneficial for your energy and mood, they may cause anxiety if you’re not careful.

In the productivity guru and influencer world, how people “do” their mornings are often a focus. To start your day right, you should eat this way and not that way. To be more productive, do this, not that.

Commonly recommended morning practices ― like exercising or journaling ― can be helpful and healthy. “But if we get too rigid about certain rituals in our day, that’s when they can become more toxic,” said Han Ren, a licensed psychologist, speaker and educator based in Austin.

When you put contingencies around what your morning “should” look like, this can make you anxious about doing everything perfectly ― then anxious if things don’t go as planned. Even healthy habits can stress you out if you feel you “must” do them for your day to start well.

This stress can be more pronounced if you’re a perfectionist. If you don’t achieve these self-imposed expectations, you can end up feeling like a failure or feeling like you haven’t done enough, said Athina Danilo, a licensed marriage and family therapist based in Burbank, California.

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60 Best Father's Day Gifts - Shield Insurance Agency Blog

60 Best Father’s Day Gifts

60 Best Father’s Day Gifts for Every Type of Dad

Father’s Day Gifts Ideas: Full of unique ideas to celebrate your husband, dad, grandpa, or another father figure in your life.

Although your dad may say he doesn’t want anything for Father’s Day this year, you know that showing up at his door without a present isn’t a possibility. After all, he’s the guy you looked up to (quite literally) all these years, and it’s only fitting to get him a Father’s Day gift that shows just how much you appreciate him and all that he does for your whole family. Finding the perfect present for your dad is tricky, though: You want to get a unique Father’s Day gift that he’ll use — something that’s meaningful, funny, or a little bit of both.

That’s exactly why we’ve rounded up the best Father’s Day gifts for every kind of father figure in your life, including your stepdad, father-in-law, or grandpa. That’s right, most of these picks work for any of the men in your life, like your brother who just became a new dad or your husband who is the best dad to your kids. Oh, and if you’re shopping for multiple people, we made sure to include plenty of budget-friendly options that will arrive in two days or less, everything from hilarious gag gifts to personalized keepsakes.


This article features a ton of gift ideas with everything from homemade beer to a nifty blue tooth shower speaker. And don’t stop there! More ideas are listed in fresh articles at the bottom of their page….. WOWZA!

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What is Mindfulness - Shield Insurance Agency Blog

What Is Mindfulness?

by Kim Painter, AARP, May 26, 2021

What Is Mindfulness? And Why It Might Make You Happier

Focusing on the present moment can help you quiet anxiety and find perspective

En español | What is Mindfulness? When psychiatrist Judson Brewer, M.D., wants to help a patient stop smoking, one of the first things he does is ask the smoker to give his or her full attention to smoking a cigarette, focusing on how it tastes, smells and feels right then.

“Not one of them has come back and said that they enjoyed smoking,” says Brewer, who is director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center in Providence, R.I., and author of a new book, Unwinding Anxiety. Noticing that smoking is actually unpleasant can be the first step to quitting — and it’s a prime example of how mindful living can change your life, Brewer says.

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How A National Student Databse Could Cheapen The College Experience - Shield Insurance Agency Blog

How a national student database could cheapen the college experience

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has proposed that the federal government create a national student database that includes information on outcomes for individual college graduates, such as how much money they earn after they get a degree in a particular major. That’s according to a report that a commission sponsored by the foundation released in May 2021.

I asked the U.S. Education Department if they plan to adopt the proposed database, but did not get a yes-or-no answer.

“There are currently statutory prohibitions against the department developing a new national database on student information,” said Melanie Muenzer, chief of staff for the Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal.

Muenzer said the department is reviewing the commission’s recommendations. “We anticipate more conversations with commission members to learn even more,” Muenzer said

In some ways, those “conversations” have already begun. Michelle Asha Cooper, a former member of the commission, now serves as deputy assistant secretary for higher education under Biden.

Why do we need a National Student Database?

As a political theorist who specializes in education policy and its impact on society, I think that a national student database would change the focus of much of American higher education.

Many people understand the university experience as an opportunity for a variety of educational and enriching experiences. I believe this proposed database will shift the focus to ensuring that college graduates earn a certain level of income and wealth. Although the commission says the purpose is to address racism, classism and sexism, I think that it is more accurate to say that the commission wants to frame the value of higher education in largely economic terms.

Defining value

The Gates Foundation created the Postsecondary Value Commission precisely to define the value of a college degree. As commission member Margaret Spellings has said: “people don’t spend $80,000 or borrow lots of money because they want to be better people.”

The report nods to the value of the liberal arts in sustaining a healthy democracy. However, according to commission member José Luis Cruz, the report concentrates on “easily quantifiable measures of value.”

The report creates a framework to rate the economic payoff of colleges, majors and certificate programs. At the bottom of the scale, graduates are not financially better off than if they had simply graduated high school. Higher scores suggest that students of color, students from low-income backgrounds and women are getting an earnings premium. The highest score indicates that a program is helping all of its graduates gain the same wealth as their white, male peers.

Database details

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Delayed Claims Reporting - Shield Insurance Agency Blog

Delayed Claims Reporting

Delayed claims reporting: the true cost to businesses and injured workers

Shield Agency Blog: Delayed claims reporting

Delayed claims. Workplace injuries that go unreported can keep employees on the sidelines — uncertain about treatment and unclear on what to expect under their state’s WC system. When workplace incidents do happen, prompt claim reporting is a key factor to ensuring injured employees receive the necessary care to feel supported in a successful return — and minimizing business impact.

Businesses appreciate the value of speed. Consider these strategies to accelerate your injury reporting and prevent delayed claims:

  • Make the connection. Assigning a point of contact responsible for reporting helps employees know who to talk to.
  • Early education. Familiarize employees with the injury reporting process early and often, so they know what to do if the time comes.
  • Leverage technology. Your insurer may have apps, tools, or data enhancements to streamline your reporting to make it faster and easier.
  • Encourage treatment. Discuss injuries in private, and don’t blame or belittle workers for their injuries. Stress your support for their recovery, and help them find the right provider. You don’t want employees hiding an injury.
  • Measure. Rapid reporting has clear benefits — track successes and hold management accountable to reporting targets, with a recommended target of 80 percent of workers compensation claims reported within three days.

Get ahead of reporting lag, and you’re advocating for both your workers and your workers compensation outcomes.

Claim Reporting Lag Study

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Farmers Market - Shield Insurance Agency Blog

Farmers Market in Hudsonville, MI

Visit Shield Insurance at the Farmers Market
on July 28, August 25, and September 25

Register to win a RoboVac 35C Wi-Fi Connected Robot Vacuum Regularly priced at $300 !

The weather was beautiful for a morning out and about for the first Hudsonville Farmers Market. The food and people were fabulous and it was fun to meet a lot of new people. Come and see us!

Click here to visit the Farmers Market web site for all the details!

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How to Navigate A Hot Housing Market - Shield Insurance Agency Blog

How to Navigate a Hot Housing Market

Shield Insurance Agency Blog | By Ann Carrns Published May 14, 2021Updated May 29, 2021

How to Navigate a Hot Housing Market

Competition for homes in many cities is leading potential buyers to take steps they may not have considered a short time ago, including waiving the inspection. Lets take a look at how to navigate a hot housing market.

The home-buying market this spring is not for the faint of heart.

The main challenge is that the supply of homes for sale in most parts of the country continues to fall far short of demand. That is pushing up prices to heart-stopping levels in many markets. A lack of construction over the past decade, plus pent-up demand from pandemic shutdowns, has unleashed a national seller’s market. The median price for a single-family home rose about 18 percent in March to almost $335,000, a record high, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist for the Redfin online brokerage, said homes being listed for sale are selling quickly. About half sell in less than a week, usually after multiple offers.

The usual tips — like getting preapproved for a mortgage — apply more than ever. But competition in many cities is leading potential buyers to take steps they may not have considered even a few months ago, including offering tens of thousands of dollars above the asking price; agreeing to let the seller live, rent-free, in the house for several months after the closing; and waiving certain contingencies, like the right to inspect the house before buying.

Waiving inspections has long been common in competitive housing cities like Seattle, but it is becoming more frequent elsewhere, real estate professionals say.

Buyers will sometimes send personal notes to sellers to distinguish themselves from others vying for the same property, though some Realtors discourage the practice. Such “Dear Seller” letters include an introduction to the buyers and copious compliments about the house.

Mark Strüb, a real estate agent in Austin, Texas, sometimes invites buyers to write the letters, he said: “It never hurts.” He said he once had a seller with a strong sentimental attachment to the house pass over the highest offer because the potential buyer failed to write a letter, while the others vying for the home had all done so.

Dig deeper into the Hot Housing Market.

But agents often discourage sellers from reviewing such letters out of concern that the letters may reveal details about a buyer’s family status, race or religion that could inadvertently cause sellers to run afoul of fair-housing laws in their decision-making.

“It can actually backfire,” said Francine Viola, an agent in Olympia, Wash.

Buyers may note, for instance, that they look forward to gathering around the fireplace on Christmas, or that they find the home attractive because it is near a mosque. Should the seller be influenced by those details, the thinking goes, other buyers whose offers were rejected could potentially challenge the sale, claiming that they were victims of religious bias.

The Realtors association issued guidance last fall recommending that agents avoid using “love” letters. “Seemingly harmless,” the association said, “these letters actually raise fair-housing concerns.”

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