The Client and Its Challenge
A City in the Northwest takes risk management seriously. Its Risk Management Department has been tracking loss data electronically since 1976. The City has been relying, until recently, on a DOS system to track this information, a system that had become antiquated.

In 1999, the City averaged 133 open claims per month, and the City was tracking roughly 333 new claims annually. With $952,000 in claims in 1999 and a self-insured workers’ compensation reserve of $2.4 million, measuring the City’s total cost of risk (TCOR) was critical. TCOR was the City’s primary performance measure; having accurate, consolidated TCOR reports for allocations of expenses to all city departments and for annual department budgeting was mandatory.

The City also was interested in a system that would assist its risk management department in providing safety services to city employees. Without a satisfactory solution, the City would be left tracking its training, testing, and other compliance requirements manually in order to compile statistics for monthly safety reporting.

In addition, the City needed its new system to facilitate its return-to-work program. The risk management department wanted to enhance the safety and claims administration services for 2,100 employees throughout the city. Payroll clerks located in the major operating departments such as public safety, sanitation, and parks and recreation had been required to capture the appropriate data. With 1,200 lost workdays, the need to formalize the return-to-work program was evident. The department also intended to launch an integrated disability management program, once workers’ compensation administration was integrated with the new RMIS.

The new RMIS system needed to be windows-based, centralized and scalable, allowing it to track its volume of new claims annually as well as maintain its history of prior claims. It also needed to integrate smoothly with the numerous other data-tracking systems that go into running a city. Finally, the City wanted a solution that would minimize redundancy when entering data and, thus, free it from its reliance on costly paper forms.

The Risk Consulting Solution
With these and other objectives in mind, the Risk Manager for the City developed a request for proposals with demanding, detailed specifications. After a rigorous eight-month process, the City selected STARS as the best solution. STARS was able to meet and even exceed all of the City’s requirements: it is scalable, provides electronic first reports of injury (FROIs), supports numerous users with varying access rights, and also provides the industry benchmark for risk management reporting. But one aspect of STARS made it most competitive: the STARS Custom Solutions Team.

Because of STARS’ open architecture and the experience of the custom solutions team (CST), it was possible to quickly develop highly sophisticated solutions for a completely centralized RMIS, freeing the risk management department from redundant administrative tasks.

The CST developed plug-ins to export payments created in STARS and other financial information from five different claim financial buckets directly into the City’s enterprise-wide accounts payable/check printing system.

The team did not stop with exports. The Risk Manager and her team identified the need to import claimant information from their medical bill review provider’s system. The CST created an interface to pull an extract from the City’s human resources system. The plug-in then imports the extract into STARS. This provides users a simplistic way to electronically “look up” employee data such as address, supervisor, hired date and training information. When a claim is added, this information is imported into the employee claim record, populating 33 fields that would normally be entered manually.

Results
STARS allows the City to confidently leave its DOS system and maintain its extensive data, and move forward with a top RMIS that is highly customized. Having an electronic process to file the state-required forms such as FROIs and others also reduces the City’s laborious paper requirements. Finally, having a real-time central repository of loss and exposure data, plus the time savings from system integrations, will allow the City to streamline its administrative processes, so the team can focus its efforts on reducing future claims.