American Airlines: How Customization and Collaboration Resulted in Improved Return to Work and Significant Savings

"Genex held an important role in the workers’ compensation program creation and directly contributed to achieving our goals. We chose the unbundled claims program to benefit from expertise assisting us in managing medical care which in turn, allowed our injured employees to return to work as soon as safely possible." - Jennifer Saddy, Director Workers’ Compensation Corporate Insurance & Risk Management, American Airlines

Name: American Airlines
Industry: Aviation
Location/s: Fort Worth, TX
Employee Size: 118,500 worldwide

The Problem

American Airlines Group (AAG) merged with US Airways and combined two very different workers’ compensation (WC) programs, essentially recreating a brand new WC program including a new WC team. Their primary focus was to develop a strong early intervention program to close claims faster due to a large number of open legacy claims. The goals were 1) reduce total pending claims, 2) reduce aged pending claims, 3) improve current year claims closing ratio, 4) reduce legal costs, and 5) reduce Temporary Total Disability spend.

The Solution

Creating together a successful multi-vendor program required research, benchmarking and assessing historical data to design a best-in-class program. Willis Towers Watson was instrumental in outlining strategies based on the data analysis from all American and US Airways pre-merger program partners. They helped direct the creation of an integrated program with milestones and performance metrics agreed upon by all parties. Genex’s TCM/FCM, UR, Bill Review, IME & Peer Review services were selected based on proven results from the legacy US Airways early intervention program and Genex’s ability to customize the services to meet AAG’s needs. Genex worked closely with American Airline’s other partners to proactively manage and close more cases and initiated program enhancements based on a proprietary dashboard paired with expert analytical capabilities to enable the easy identification of potential problems and improvement opportunities.

The Outcome

As a result of the custom program implementation, analytical fine-tuning and joint partnership among vendors, American Airlines was able to close claims faster and lower the cost per claim. In the first year, the strong focus on early intervention yielded a 32% decrease in average claim duration and a 4.3% decrease in average cost per claim.