As is often said, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To me, that means your personal context colors your perspective; similar people can look at similar circumstances and reach dissimilar conclusions. In workers' comp, that axiom applies to "success."
Various stakeholders define success differently. To an injured worker, success could be regaining health to his or her pre-injury state while building a retirement nest egg. To a treating physician, success could be restoring health to the patient at a fair price. To an employer, success could be the quick and safe return to work of a colleague that does not raise its workers' comp premiums. To a carrier or third-party administrator (TPA), success could be the proper management of a claim that yields a satisfied customer while maximizing profit. To an attorney representing the injured worker, success could be maximizing the financial payoff for the client and the law firm. To a vendor (pharmacy benefit manager, bill review, utilization review, transportation/translation or surveillance company), success could be providing services that provide recognized value to a customer.
In some cases, the definition of success can be both positive (appropriate services for a fair price) and negative (maintaining the revenue stream through means that might be inconsistent with "appropriate services" or "fair prices"). It is the business conundrum in workers' comp - how to balance the need to provide appropriate services with the need to stay financially viable in a system that sometimes rewards the latter more than the former.
Let's simplify what true success is for workers' comp: restoring the health of the injured worker and settling the claim efficiently.
Realistically, the worker might not be restored fully to pre-injury health, but regaining as much as possible is certainly the goal. When it comes to managing chronic pain that will likely never completely go away, good treatment can be inadvertently sabotaged by issues of tolerance, dependence and addiction. The prescription drug abuse epidemic illustrates that the outcome of overtreatment and inappropriate treatment can often create more problems than it resolves.
For those who have received inappropriate treatment with sub-optimal results, success may be less about a full return to health and more about a return to some level of function. That could be something as simple as taking 500 steps a day (thewalkingsite.com offers guidelines for 10,000 steps a day). Maybe return to work is no longer viable, so success is now more about being a meaningful member of family and community. Maybe detoxification is appropriate, but abstinence is not attainable, so finding a lower number and dosage of appropriate drugs is success. For those stuck in a cycle of victimization, low self-esteem and poor socioeconomic circumstances, perhaps success is more about acquiring skills to properly cope with pain and change (and life in general).
In other words, maybe success is a lot simpler than we think - if the injured worker wins by regaining health and function, then everyone else wins too.
