Why does your business need an occupational medical physician?

Occupational Medicine is that specialty devoted to a person’s health as their work environment affects it. At CompChoice we give top quality and cost effective medical care to employees while maintaining an understanding for the business needs of the employer. We also perform consultations for employability, ADA, FMLA, injury causation, toxic exposure issues, regulatory examinations, personal protective equipment and primary injury prevention. This talent for balancing one duty with another responsibility sets us apart in the medical community.

Most doctors have been rightfully trained to aggressively protect the doctor/patient relationship. It’s often difficult for them to change their approach to confidentiality when one of their patients presents for a workers compensation injury. Promoting communication between medical providers and the employer is undoubtedly the most effective way Occupational Medicine physicians can help injured workers successfully transition back to productive work.

Not only are we skilled with non-operative care of injury, the physicians at CompChoice keep current on the best ways to help people recover and return to normal function. We obviously utilize the latest medical treatments, but also understand the benefits of using modified work to promote progressive resumption of normal activities. Keeping a person at work during recovery benefits the employee by providing a familiar rehab environment, a normal paycheck, and preventing unnecessary complications such as disability syndrome. The employer benefits by retaining a valued employee, maintaining production demands and lower indemnity costs.

The patient who doesn’t recover as expected is a challenge to the doctor as well as the employer. When an employee remains disabled beyond usual medical expectations the relationship with their employer is strained and creates another barrier for return to work. Many personal physicians are not equipped to understand the subtle non-medical causes of delayed recovery. Occupational Medicine doctors recognize warning signs of extended disability early and know how to prevent them from interfering with return to work.

Employees sometimes make uninformed and incorrect assumptions about how their work has caused or affected a medical problem. Their doctor, who is trained to accept patient history unconditionally, accepts their perception as fact. This leads the personal physician to designate a medical condition as work related when they really don’t have adequate facts or information to do so. The Occupational Medicine physicians at CompChoice are specially trained to evaluate cause and affect relationships between work tasks or exposures and injury or illness. Assessment of causation requires a systematic approach to understanding work duties, objective assessment of work’s impact upon body systems or mechanics, and conclusions based upon sound scientific principles.

Lastly the Occupational Medicine doctor knows that the best way to understand an employer’s needs is to see how that business functions. When we start to work with a new employer/client the providers at CompChoice expect to visit the workplace and gain an appreciation of the business and its employees. By understanding specific work tasks and opportunities for light duty we gain credibility with injured employees and are better equipped to help them recover through progressive resumption of work duties.