Injured Workers Pharmacy Blog

What happens after you’ve been injured on the job? The question might be a simple one, but the answer is a lot more complex. Your state, employer, and even your type of injury can play a role in your experience within the workers’ comp system.

What would injured workers do without workers’ compensation? Unless you have money readily available to pay for injury-related medical bills and support yourself while you recover outside of work, you may have had to sue your employer and prove that they were at fault for causing your injury. 

If you visit a healthcare provider frequently, you may have heard the term “value-based care”, or VBC. In a basic sense, value-based care is a model that pays a healthcare provider based on the patient’s health outcome. This means providers are incentivized to provide better, more effective care in exchange for payment. As the phrase goes, VBC would be quality over quantity.

Filling your workers’ comp prescriptions at a local retail pharmacy can be a hassle. Workers’ comp, which is a different type of insurance than your personal health plan, requires a few extra steps that retail pharmacies may not be equipped to handle.

Towns, states, and the entire country are struggling with the current opioid epidemic and how to address it. Some states and counties have created various initiatives to help reduce opioid abuse including dosage limits, expanded access to Narcan, and prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) requirements.  Ohio is one of those states tackling the opioid epidemic head-on, including their strides within the state’s workers’ comp system.

Every year, approximately 3 million workers are injured on the job with more than 4,500 of those injuries resulting in fatalities. In recent years, fatal work injuries have been on the rise among self-employed and contract workers.

Sometimes in workers’ compensation we hear the term “Medicare Set Aside”, or more commonly, MSA.  So, what is an MSA?  Just like it’s title, an MSA is a set-aside.  When an injured worker settles their claim and is expected to have future medical bills associated with their injury and are receiving or will start receiving Medicare, they will be required to set up an MSA.

Patient satisfaction has been a key motivator in workers’ compensation claims. For many injured workers recovering from a work injury, finances, loss of mobility or issues with insurance carriers can make you have a negative outlook on the entire workers’ comp system.  

Being hurt at work can be very frustrating and confusing for many people.   In Georgia, the Workers’ Compensation Act applies to businesses with three or more regular employees.  Generally, any physical injury or accident that arose out of and in the course of employment qualifies for workers’ compensation. 

You may have heard the term “Return to Work program” if you’ve been injured on the job. Traditionally, these types of programs were introduced as a way to help employers save on workers’ compensation costs by allowing the injured worker to slowly transition back into the workforce. Now, Return to Work (RTW) programs have taken on a much more employee-friendly approach, helping to meet the needs of both the employer and employee.