Year: 2018

Truth be told, our recap of the weird this week has nothing to do with the holidays, but since I likely won’t be posting anything next week, I had to make something sound festive. Might as well be the title. This was another banner week for the wacky and absurd. We had a Chinese man…

Today is a day that not many people get the opportunity to see. It is my father’s 99th birthday, and statistically it is not a common event. In our family, however, there is precedent. We are blessed with good genes, with grandparents who lived into their 90’s on both sides of the family. My father’s father…

I had a strange feeling going in. Something wasn’t quite right; everything to this point had gone too smoothly.  I just knew it was too good to be true. The set up for the latest Hot Seat Webinar, entitled “The Faces of Kids’ Chance: A Life Changing Organization” had gone smoothly enough. The guests had readily…

Since one of the topics covered in this blog is technology in the workers’ compensation industry, I have been granted a press pass at the CES2019 in Las Vegas next month. CES, colloquially known as the Consumer Electronics Show, is the largest technology-based conference and exhibit in the world. Last year it was attended by…

A story that made a big impact this week on social media and elsewhere, that involves a human heart left in an airplane cargo hold and a flight rerouted to deliver it, is a lesson that perceptions can be more important than reality. The story about the misdirected heart has evolved a bit, and it is interesting…

We spend a lot of time in the workers’ compensation industry griping about jurisdictional forms. They are often complex, and some are poorly designed with fields too small to accommodate the information they demand. The biggest issue, for many people, is that no two forms are alike, even though they may require the same information…

For the many people who have been advocating a shift in our workers’ compensation claims handling philosophy the last few years, this year’s National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference in Las Vegas was not a disappointment. The “Advocacy Based Claims” movement received front and center attention this year, with conference Chair Roberto Ceniceros noting during…

  Many jobs are difficult, but some are clearly more challenging than others. Take the recent story of a drug dealer released from jail only to return within a few hours of his release. It seems the man, released from a Philadelphia jail about 6:15PM, hadn’t even made it out of the parking lot when he beat…

I had a chance some time back to speak at length with John Watts, CEO of Paradigm Outcomes, about the growth his company was undergoing as well as some of the changes we are seeing in the workers’ compensation sector. Paradigm, founded in 1991, is the nation’s leading provider of catastrophic and complex care management.…

There were a couple back to back stories this week that were not just unusual in nature; they were great examples that not all workplace activity in the air occurs inside an airplane. In one story, a skydiving instructor was found to have committed suicide by separating himself mid-dive from his student and plummeting to his…