RHS 152 - Darrin Schenck on Why Nurse Triage Services Are Perfect Value Add for Independent Agents

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you.
It is a conversation with Darren Schrenk, the Vice President of Sales of Triage Now. Triage Now is a nurse triage service that we were referred to by Mike McDonald.
You'll hear us discuss that, the Workers' Comp Renegade, who is a friend of the show, and now I'm a big fan of his. And I wanted to have this conversation with Darren for a couple of reasons.
One, I think that nurse triage services, adding this as a value added service of your agency to your customers, particularly your workers' comp customers, particularly your customers who have a decent number of employees or are in our high mod clients, clients that have a high loss exposure, even shock exposures, that adding nurse triage to their business can drastically reduce the number of claims, certainly the frequency of claims and hopefully the size of claims. And I just wanted to get this service in front of you.
We use Nurse Triage. We don't use it on all our clients.
It's not necessarily an effective tool for every client you have, but for certain types of clients, I find it to be an invaluable tool. We explain it in detail.
If you're looking to separate yourself, if you're looking to add nurse triage services, triage now is one of the vendors that we, well, it's who we use, obviously, it's who we recommend, but there are a few out there. As you'll hear Darren describe, I wanted to get the service in front of you, get it explained, and I think you're going to, if you're a wonky insurance professional, if you're looking for value-added services, if you write commercial insurance, this is an episode you're absolutely going to love.
Guys, a couple other quick notes here before we get to Darren. You've heard throughout the recent episodes, we were acquired by SIA back in April 1st of 2022.
It has been an incredibly exciting time. We're growing like crazy at Rogue Risk.
If you are a producer or if you're an agency owner that feels like you've hit a plateau, so for producers, this would be, you know, you're in a place where you're not being supported, that's pushing traditional methods on you in areas where you could see, use of digital tools could greatly expand. If you're not working in a culture of growth, if you're not kind of stepping into the next generation of insurance production and you want to do so, rogue risk could be the answer.
We are hiring like crazy. We're looking for people that want to produce, that want to grow, that want to learn and in a culture where I think our culture is second to none.
I think we are supportive, but we hold each other accountable. It's a pretty incredible place to work right now and we need more great producers.
We need people who want to get out there and work and regardless of where you are in your career evolution, whether you're towards the beginning, just starting out, or you're in the middle or wherever, if you feel like you've hit that plateau, if you feel like you're not being supported, if you are willing to step into an environment where you're going to be held accountable, but ultimately limitless production and a no-sealing insurance career is something you're looking for, then reach out to us. Go to join.roguerisk.com today.
That's join.roguerisk.com today. Check us out.
Learn all about it. Reach out.
We can have a conversation. We'd love to have you.
Now, I also mentioned insurance agency owners. And one of the things that's different about Rogue is that we are looking to facilitate the no-ceiling insurance career.
So if you're an agency owner and you love producing, you absolutely love producing, you're a killer, but you hate running your agency or your agency just you can't figure out how to get out of the way. You've plateaued.
Hiring people is terrible. Systems is a pain in the ass.
You want to have good markets. You want to grow.
You want to build an asset. You want to build a career.
We can help you do that. It's part of our no-insurance, no-ceiling insurance career.
So even agency principals, if you're looking to get out from under all the nonsense of running your agency, but you still want all that upside that comes with being a principal, there are conversations to be had in that area. So go to join.roguerisk.com or just reach out to me directly.
You can find me on any of the socials or ryan at rogerisk.com is my email address. Guys, reach out.
We can have conversations about what the future looks like. Rogue is a model that facilitates its people.
We facilitate the careers and success of our people first. And by doing so, our people take care of our customers.
And in that way, we differentiate ourselves, we define who we are and what's important to us. And ultimately, we create careers for the people that work for Rogue Risk, not just jobs, their careers.
With that, let's get on to Darren Schrank. All right, man.
Well, I'm excited to have you on the show and talk through what you guys do and not just about the company itself, but about the process and more about adding value as an insurance agent, how we do that. So maybe just a great place to start our conversation is just, you know, a little bit about yourself and then just to give some background and then maybe take that right into Triage Now and what exactly it is that you guys do.
Okay. Well, my name is Darren Shank.
I'm the VP of sales at Triage Now. Been with the company since day one, which was at the time of recording here was about nine and a half years ago.
Helped build us from literally an idea scratched on the back of a napkin to one of the top providers of telephonic nurse triage services

nationwide. So we came along about 10 years after the main competitors that I look at us having,

and we had the luxury of standing on their shoulders and looking at what they did well,

but then also finding some of the holes that we could plug, bring technology into the fold,

things like that. And that's how we have leapfrogged our way into the position that we're in now.
So Triage Now is based in Phoenix. We do have, we have coverage nationwide.
We have clients in all 50 states. We're a 24-7 telephonic nurse triage service, like many of the other main providers of this.
And we do hire everybody out of our Phoenix office. I'm actually part of the hiring committee.
I love the fact that I can tell a prospective client that I know personally, the nurses that will be talking to your injured employees because I helped hire them and add them to our team. Yeah, that's awesome.
So what is telephonic nurse triage services? So what this service is meant to do is really bridge the gap between companies that can afford to have a doctor or a nurse on site and those that just have to send everybody to the clinic down the street. So having a third party medical professional become part of the evaluation of an injury and give someone guidance on what to do for that workplace injury or incident has a twofold benefit.
First and foremost, what we do is make sure that people get guided to the appropriate level of care. So that means minor injuries, like a sprain or strain, for example, may not end up in the clinical system if it meets certain criteria.
And it has to be minor injuries, right? None of the triage services are in the business of sacrificing care to help the client's bottom line. We all do the same thing in the sense that we are looking to guide someone to the appropriate level of care.
And then the byproduct of that approach yields a certain number of injuries that don't enter the clinical system. And that becomes the benefit for the employer.
It's the best employee experience possible in that unfortunate scenario of a workplace injury. But when you get to talk to a medical professional right away, and they help determine what should be done next for that injury, that's the peace of mind the

employees are looking for. And then on the employer side, if we do take some of those unnecessary clinic visits out of the equation, that reduces the number of injuries that become work comp claims, it removes the unnecessary expenditure for those unnecessary clinic visits, it helps control someone's EMR or EMOD score,

or in California, XMOD,

reduce the number of OSHA recordables, things like that.

So it's a win across the board

for both the employee and the employer in that process.

And also, and just full disclosure to everyone,

we use Triage Now for a few of our clients. We were introduced were introduced to them by, uh, the workers comp renegade, Mike McDonough, who is the man and Mike McDonough.
Yeah. Friend of the show.
And, uh, I'm also personally a big fan of his, um, been very, very helpful to us in our journey. And, uh, he introduced us to you guys and we've been incredibly happy.
And, um, so just wanted to get that out there. Not that it means anything other than we use you guys, but the other thing too, that we, when we're explaining to one of our customer, one of our clients, why a triage service, a telephonic nurse triage services is right for them.
It's also that that first incident report, right? It gives it takes what we found is a lot of a lot of companies and this just makes sense because people have 10 million things on their plate, someone will get hurt. And there won't even be a note of it until all of a sudden they end up at the doctor's or urgent care a couple weeks later because the elbow is still hurt or their knees still hurt.
And there's no like, well, I think he reported it a couple of weeks ago, but I'm not really sure. And now, now it's a mess.
And, um, what we found is that if, if you can get your client to make these phone calls, just a part of their culture. What you have is a very consistent documented record of each incident, even if it doesn't eventually become a claim or a doctor's visit.
And that is very powerful as well. Yeah.
Not only are we the first line of defense when it comes to helping determine what to do next for that injury, but we're also the documentation service that allows us to keep everybody on the same page day one, hour one of that phone call.

So that includes the employer, even a direct supervisor could receive certain information from us, the employer, the risk management team or the safety committee, whoever is appropriate, the broker, the insurance carrier, everybody's on the same page. And that can be invaluable for sure.
I can't speak for every triage service, but we record the phone calls as well. And so if there's ever any discrepancy of information or somebody discloses to the nurse, well, I twisted my ankle playing soccer with the kids on Saturday, but now that I stood around at work on Monday, it's swollen up and it hurts.
And so I'm calling to report this workplace injury. That's not a workplace injury.
But because we have that recorded statement, because you have a medical professional documenting everything that's said, you as a broker and the insurance carrier now have some

real ground to stand on in determining compensability or denying it. Yeah.
I have a client and they, I'm not obviously not going to disclose their name, but they deal with, They help children who are either dealing with socialized disorders of some sort or have had a trauma and they're trying to reintegrate them into schools. And unfortunately, what you get is a lot of bites and a lot of issues around an adult trying to restrain a kid who is having an episode and, and there's sometimes the, the, the employees, the adults, they get pushed to the ground or whatever.
Okay. So, and they have fairly frequent claims because this is just the nature of the work.
It's a lot of bites, actually, bites. Kids bite adults when they're being restrained a lot.
That's what I've learned about from this client. That all being said, what we were, they were having, there was one particular individual who seemed to be having a lot of incidents.
And what they were actually able to find and adjusted, I think they adjusted how she was managed or what this individual was claiming she was being pushed and stuff and it wasn't actually happening and that came out in a few of the calls because the way she was describing them was different than the way uh someone who they knew for sure was actually her or there was like another person there so they were actually able to use these written reports which you get so so so people know, so people know the incident, I should let you explain the whole process, but we basically get an incident report afterwards. And we were able to, when we saw that this one individual was having a lot of reports, like almost a monthly report coming in, we're able to say, well, what's going on? And then from there, able to learn that she wasn't doing something right.
To be honest with you, the actual details of how it was resolved are escaping me. But the idea was these reports and the fact that they were being consistently documented was able to help us make a decision.
So maybe to that extent, you could walk people through just the mechanics of how someone gets injured and then what happens. How does it work? Yeah.
So just as a precursor thought to that, we're not in the gotcha business, right? It happens on occasion enough to be worth mentioning, but not as often as most people think. Unfortunately, we did see a spike during the pandemic days when somebody was having an injury outside of work that they tried to make a work comp claim because that's their new insurance program kind of thing.
You know, there's always some small subset of people that try to get away with stuff. And no triage service has the answer to eliminate all of that.
But to your point, when you have a medical professional who's asking detailed questions about the injury, what led up to it, things like that, it becomes pretty clear, especially to somebody who has experience in that, that this person has changed their story or they're leaving out details that are relevant, things like that. And again, we're not judge and jury when that happens.
We're a triage service, but we provide the information to the people who can be judge and jury, and that allows them to determine compensability. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes, that's a really good point. And we weren't, it wasn't like we were using it for that way.
It was just we started to see a trend. And then the only information that we had to go back on off of that trend was these reports.
And then in looking at the reports, that's how we came to the, to some of the conclusions that ultimately were had. It wasn't, um, yeah, that's a, that's a great point.
Yeah. Yeah.
Anytime you can aggregate data and look at it from a high level view, you can find patterns like that. And to your point, you know, maybe change some training or issue different safety equipment or whatever would be appropriate to try to trend those things in a different direction.
That's always helpful I actually I know what it was now uh they they're supposed to wear long sleeves thick long sleeves and she wasn't wearing thick she was wearing polo shirts and stuff like that um and that's where that's what I think one of the changes was that it was they and that's a simple thing it wasn't even like the woman was doing anything wrong right where this wasn't like you said a gotcha thing it was mostly why is day. And that's a simple thing.
It wasn't even like the woman was doing anything wrong. Right.
Where this wasn't like you said, a gotcha thing. It was mostly, why is she getting, why does she have more instant? Why is this one particular human? And then it came down, she, they, you know, she was occasionally not wearing long sleeves and these, these poor people get bit like almost every day.
And if you don't have the right gear on, you know, then it becomes an issue. So, um, so yeah, I just, that's a really good point.
And I'm glad we cleared that up because you don't want it to be like, we're going to put this in place and find out. And now, cause cause I think the opposite of it, and this is actually when we first implemented with this company, there was a lot of pushback to making the calls.
Cause I think all of a sudden it went from all I have to do is tell my manager or whatever to now I actually have to call this person. I don't know who they are.
I don't know where they are. Uh, they're professional.
They're asking me questions beyond just like, Hey, are you hurt or not? And, um, you know, that that's a, that's a really interesting, it's a good point to make that it's not, this isn't trying to like police your employees. It's supposed to be a mechanism to help them, you know, get better, quicker and better medical service, hopefully.
Yeah. So it should be positioned as an employee benefit because they have the opportunity to speak to a medical professional right away.
And that medical professional can look at the big picture view. And this will segue into the process question that you asked previously.
So when we, when a third-party medical professional can ask, are you diabetic? Do you take blood thinners or other medications? A manager or supervisor should never ask those kind of HIPAA-protected questions. But clearly, that's very relevant in dealing with the injury effectively.
So that's where a service like ours can really benefit an employee, because you take their direct supervisor out of the equation. You let them speak to a medical professional privately and disclose all relevant information.
And then a determination on what they should do next is made. And that's truly in the employee's best interest for sure.
Yeah, that's really good. As far as the process goes, this is pretty much true across the board for any triage service.
When an injury occurs, if possible, it's reported to a supervisor. Some clients, that's not possible, like truck drivers and people that do HVAC on a residential roof, that kind of thing.
Those people are by themselves. So typically, they're empowered to call us directly.
But either way, the phone rings into the call center

and that company's information pops up on the screen

in front of the person who answers.

We gather demographic data

and then we transfer that call to the nurse

to triage the injury itself.

So a non-medical professional

will never give medical advice.

If somebody calls and says, I'm having chest pains,

that short circuits the process.

We get them right to a nurse

Thank you. a non-medical professional will never give medical advice.
If somebody calls and says, I'm having chest pains, that short circuits the process. We get them right to a nurse.
Most likely the directive is going to be hang up and call 911 unless that person has the opportunity to tell a supervisor to call 911 and stay on the line with us to help, you know, make sure that if something takes a drastic turn, that at least a medical professional is available to help somebody else start the process if necessary. But luckily, we're in the minor injury business 99.8% of the time.
So that means that a typical injury like a sprain or a strain, bruise, contusion, minor cuts, burns, lacerations, bites, scratches, punches, you know, whatever it may be. Those kind of things are looked at, again, including that injured employee's medical history, medications, all those things are factored in.
And then the nurse goes through the medical algorithms that we have in place to determine what the appropriate level of care would be. and on a rare occasion, that is sending somebody to an ER.
Sometimes that's due to just the time of day, because at six in the morning or nine o'clock at night, there typically aren't any clinics open. I live in Phoenix, a city of 5 million people.
There's one clinic that's open 24 hours. It's a concentra.
It's right downtown, which sounds like it's conveniently located, but for my house, the part of town I live in, that's 25 minutes away. So in some cases, just out of a restriction of resources, an ER would be utilized.
But whenever possible, we're trying to get somebody to a clinic so that they can be seen quickly and not spend three or four hours waiting at an ER for a minor workplace injury. As part of that process, when we gather all the demographic data, at the end of the call, not only do we instruct the injured employee on what to do, but then we send out all the documentation.
So again, everybody's on the same page, day one, hour one of that injury occurring. So when we send documentation to a clinic, that acts as approval for treatment.
And so the insurance carrier is notified to set up a claim. The clinic is not going to delay care trying to reach somebody for approval to treat this injury and make sure the bill is going to be paid.
That whole process is streamlined by utilizing a triage service. For us at Triage Now, that process is for a phone call from start to finish is about 18 minutes.
That includes an outbound call to a clinic to make sure because with the pandemic stuff kind of still lingering, there's clinics out there that on the internet, it says they're open from seven to seven, but they will cut off taking new patients at four or 5 PM. So we make an outbound call to make sure we're not going to send somebody to a clinic.
That's going to turn them away, get back on the line with the injured employee, tell them where to go, shoot them a text message of which clinic to go to the clinics, hours of operation and other information. Or if they end up with a self-care disposition, we give them a checklist of what to do for self-care and then make it very clear that we're here anytime, day or night, to call us back if they have questions or concerns.
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All right, I'm out of here. Peace.
Let's get back to the episode. What kind of results have you seen from this? Like, you know, one of the things that we've seen in our clients is just a reduction in total claims.
Yeah. I the, and I think there's some stuff that's I don't want to say it's, it's an indirect, indirect, indirect results, which are things like, because I have to call.
So if I just get a bruise on my arm, I bang my arm and really my arm is fine. I know my arm is fine.
If I had to tell the manager and now the manager is going to give me a half day off. Cause I get to, and I'm getting, I'm not talking about, but like, you know, they, they, now I got to call and talk to somebody and explain, or maybe I do call and then nothing ever happened.
So we've seen, you know, I don't want to have hard numbers. This is, this is a little somewhere in the 40 plus percent reduction in, in frequency.
I don't want to, we don't have any numbers around severity, our agency, but frequency of claims. We've seen somewhere around a 40% reduction in number of claims in the clients who have fully implemented triage now.

And that's a huge benefit.

I mean, just that alone is enormous. Do you have solid numbers? Is there anything you can share? To some degree, yeah.
There is no governing body that all the triage services report to, and we get ranked and have each other's statistics and things like that. So I can only speak for us at triage now, but we average a 42% self-care rate for our entire client base, regardless of the industry that they're in.
So you guys fall, your clients fall right in line with that. So that includes construction and hospitality and truck drivers, anybody and everyone falls into that 42% as an average.
Like you said, some of it is a culture shift of getting people to embrace this service and utilize it appropriately. There is a little bit of learning curve sometimes, especially if a company has never had a triage service before.
It'll take a little while and ramp up to that number, that benchmark of 40% that we like to see everybody at. and you made an important distinction.
It is a 40% reduction in claims. Now, every claim varies in cost.
And for us, if somebody has about 100 injuries a year, we typically see a 10 to 1 savings to cost ratio, meaning for every dollar that they spend on the triage service, we would expect them to save $10 solely in medical expenditure. So the more injuries you have, the more of a financial quote unquote, no brainer it becomes.
If you have 10 injuries a year, and we keep four of them off of the out of the claim system and out of the clinic system, that's not going to have a tremendous amount of financial impact. But from the other perspectives of protecting your EMR score, like for a construction company, for example, those industries live and die by that number, right? If that number gets above a certain level, you get kicked off of bid lists and you don't have an opportunity to gain more work.
That's a major problem. So for some companies, that has way

more value than the thousands of dollars that we save on clinical expenditure. For somebody that

has 500 injuries a month, we may save them literally millions of dollars a year. And so

that makes it a financial no-brainer, right? For a program that costs $100,000, we save them a

million dollars. Even if we're only half as good as advertised, that's still a huge savings.
Or if they struggle to get the workforce to embrace the service and they only utilize it half the time, a five to one savings to cost ratio is still a pretty good investment. right? So it's really structured to be a win across the board, again, guiding people to the

appropriate level of care, but still having tremendous positive benefit for the employer as well. Yeah.
To me, all those numbers kind of make complete sense. It's what I've heard from other individuals and other agents that use either triage now or a different service.
So that, that makes a lot of sense to me. And, you know, the, I think, you know, if you're an agent and you're sitting at home right now, and you're thinking about, um, uh, doing anything in the workers comp space, this, this becomes almost a no brainer value added service that, that you need to become familiar with because Because the idea that your agency is going to walk in, put a couple of processes in place and have everything work, have everything work the way that you want.
I feel like you're just not going to get the same level of adoption that you get when you say, look, like the first time I saw, this was really the wake up moment for me personally, when, when we had the first claim come through the service and I saw the follow-up report, right? So we get a copy as the agent and the insured, the client gets a copy and we take that copy, we attach it in the agency management system to their file. So we have, we notate that incident, you know, we put an incident report in our system and all the things.
And I read through it and then I was like, okay, that's cool. File it away.

And then we got the second one and I saw, okay, here's the same process, separate claim, different thing, broken out here and how consistent and regimented it is. Um, and then I was able to call the insured and say, Hey, I saw you had four claims.

They all were bites.

What's what's happening.

You know, we're. And then I was able to call the insured and say, hey, I saw you had four claims.
They all were bites. What's happening? We're coming up on your audit in a few months.
How do we start to get these bite claims down? And again, I'm just using this one client as a microcosm. But most agents are not doing that.
Most agencies are not able to look at the actual instance, come back and start to solve problems. And I'm not saying we do that for every customer every time, cause there's not always a trend, but it really creates a deeper level of connection of value.
And then hopefully over time, you're, you're helping your client create a safer work culture, which is ultimately the goal, right. Is keeping that X mod down, getting them the cost savings and just a general awareness among their team members around safety.
Like just the concept of having, um, you know, this is one of the small piece of feedback I got from that same client was like, now that everyone knows they have to call, there's a general sense of like, maybe I should be safer because I don't want to have to call, you know? So like, you know, and it just, it just gets that in your mind, that safety mentality in your mind. And it's just another layer that we found to be very valuable.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's a, again, I wish, you know, we had invented the process. We certainly can't take credit for that.
But the companies that provide this on a national level all do a really good job. We each have our own nuances and differentiators that we bring to the table.

But along those lines, back to your point as a broker, when you walk in and are trying to obtain business from someone else, from somebody who is using a competitor, a lot of things are very, I hate to say it, but a lot of things are very commoditized, right? And so to have a card to throw down on the table that, hey, here's something that we offer that maybe nobody else does. We have a partnership in place or we have this service available and it is the only proactive approach to reducing claims.
It doesn't sacrifice care, but instead of all of the other solutions that we have that line up after the fact of that injury happening and it becoming a claim, we also have this piece that plugs in on the front end that helps take better care of your employees to provide all the documentation in a very timely fashion and reduce the number of injuries that become claims by about 40%. That's a tremendous client acquisition tool for sure.
And I'm not a broker, but I'm in sales. So I certainly see the value of things like that.
And so to me, as a broker, if you're considering, if you're looking for things that differentiate you from others, I would highly recommend considering a telephonic nurse triage service because it's just a win across the board. And it also looks very altruistic because as a broker, you may not have the same financial incentives that a carrier does.
But if you can reduce the number of injuries that become claims, the carrier is just going to deal with however many injuries become claims. They're not going to have too many complaints about that.
But you as a broker are adding a value-add service that, like you said, can help change the safety culture of that company, can help protect an XMOD or EMR score. All of those things have benefit to the employer that helps them stay in business, acquire new business and keep all of those people employed.
So it has a trickle up effect, so to speak, of starting at something that's affecting one individual who has an injury, but it continues to scale up to where it has wide ranging benefit for everybody involved.

How do the economics work?

So again, you know, that varies company to company.

For most of the-

Broad sense, someone's listening, just the broad sense.

Yeah.

So for in most cases, you are paying as the service is utilized or pre-purchasing calls

based on the number of projected injuries and incidents that you have per year.

So- you are paying as the service is utilized or pre-purchasing calls based on the number of projected injuries and incidents that you have per year. So again, the more injuries that you have, the more money that you spend, but the more money that you would be projected to save for sure.
So some triage services offer programs that are a really good fit for a smaller client that may have 50 injuries or less a year. Some of them, you buy a bulk of calls and use them or lose them.
So that's a little different. You kind of have to shop around and see who is the best fit for you.
But again, even if you only have 10 injuries a year, and we take four of those away out of the clinical system without sacrificing care, again, the financial benefit may not be tremendous on the medical expenditure, but the other things like protecting your EMOD, reducing OSHA recordables, things like that have way more impact for the client. Yeah.
And I think, so what I've seen a lot of agents do is they basically sign up and act as a pass-through for their clients. And they'll just invoice at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, they'll invoice their client for however many calls.
It's a pretty straightforward process. I mean, that's how we do it.
Very straightforward. So that makes a lot of sense.
You know, talk, oh, shoot, I went down that path and now I forgot the question I was going to ask. Well, I had, I had something I thought to add.
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.
That gives, it makes me look like not such a dummy for forgetting my question. So to put some numbers to it, if let, and let's use round numbers, this isn't our fee, but I'm not very good at math in my head.
So let's do it this way. If we charge a hundred dollars per incident that we handled, the average sprain or strain cost of a claim averages out to be about $1,600 for a minor injury.
So there's a 16 to one savings to cost ratio. One phone call at a hundred dollars, which again, it typically is not, uh, offsets a $1,600 claim for a sprain or strain almost 50% of the time is, is what we average.
So that means one out of every two times we're going to deflect that cost by not having that injury enter the clinical system at all. So you can see how quickly the ROI would add up.
Now, a bite claim, like you have been sharing as an example, if somebody's wearing long sleeves and it doesn't puncture the skin, that most likely can be a self-care scenario and not a clinical visit. I'm not a registered nurse.
No, and that's what we're seeing. You're 100% right.
That's what we're seeing is the reduction in claims comes from claims where normally they'd get bit. And regardless of what happened, they would send them right to the urgent care of the clinic.
Well, they were sending them urgent care. We got them out of that to start.
And then secondly, or a clinic. And now what we've seen, the reduction in claims has come from, hey, didn't break skin, no real injury, you know, put some ice on it, wrap it, whatever, you know, off you go.
And that's a great example. Yeah.
And again, that comes from a registered nurse, not a supervisor or a manager that that employee knows does not have a ton of medical training, right? Well, think about the liability that you're removing from your business. Yes mean, if someone called me and said they were injured and I give them any advice, I mean, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
You know what I mean? And unfortunately, you know, in today's world, that's, that is also a concern. I certainly don't like to sell on the idea of, of fear, but there is a liability piece to the puzzle that always has to be considered.
And by outsourcing that liability to a telephonic nurse triage service, you as an employer put layers of protection between you and that problem if things happen to take a bad turn. Yeah.
Yeah. That's a big one.
So, and just, I just want to clear up because it was a little, it was, I understood what you said, but I just want to put it in straightforward terms so people get when, when you're saying a 16 to one in your example with the sprain or strain, a 16 to one savings to cost, just so everyone's on the same page. What you're saying is that person has a mild strain of their ankle for whatever they call.
Normally, without a triage service of some sort, most likely what happens is that person hurts their ankle. They walk into their manager.
Their manager says, well, if it hurts, go to the doctor because they don't want to have the liability. The company doesn't want to have the liability and they don't know what they're doing and they're busy.
So they said, go to the doctor. That person stops work, drives to the doctor, goes to the doctor.
They wrap it up, put some ice on it. 1600 bucks right there.
Bam. Okay.
And what you're saying is instead that person, that, that person who's injured, same example, sprains their ankle, comes into their manager says, Hey, just stepped off the truck, twisted my ankle, feels a little funky. Manager goes, no problem.
Call triage now. Here you go.
They call. Talk to the doctor.
Doctor says, look, based on, you know, move it here, move it here, whatever, whatever they're. I say, I'm continuing to say doctor, nurse, the registered nurses, you know, twisted here, do this.
Okay. No pain.
Hey, you're pretty much fine. Maybe stay off it for the rest of the day or just sit at your desk for a little bit, but you don't need to go to the doctor.
You're fine. And so now instead of that $1,600 and a claim on your workers comp, you just have a hundred dollar phone call and maybe an employee that's doing soft work instead of their normal, you know, but they're still on the job, they're filing reports or whatever versus being sent home and being done.
And, and that was one of the things that I think one of the ways that I started to sell this was this isn't just cost savings and all that. It's actually a productivity tool.
Yes, because it helps you get from, you know, maybe, maybe you're, you're doing something out in the field, but you could come back and do some desk work or do, you know, actually get to your files that are sitting on your desk or whatever paperwork. And now you instead of just sitting at home because you went to the doctor, doctor says you have a sprain.
You can just sit at your desk and continue to be a productive member of the team, maybe just not

doing the thing that spring drank or you take a day off from that or whatever. And that productivity,

as you said, over time adds up and is a huge, huge advantage.

You bet. Yeah.
It's easy for people to get in the habit of sitting at home,

watching reruns of Dr. Phil instead of going to work if you allow them.
So anytime we can keep

people in the workforce productive, that's better for everybody. It gets them back in action faster.
It makes them a product, continues to have them be a productive member of the team that they're on. All of that is a benefit for sure.
Yeah. Very, very well put.
Yeah. So, you know, I love that you've shared so much about this.
I think having a triage service, and again, I advocate or just say advocate, I think, you know, we've had a very good experience with triage now. Our customers have never had a single complaint about any of the calls, any of the service.
They love the reports that they get. They love the timeliness.
So we've had a very good experience. Um, and, uh, and I appreciate that.
And it's, it's one of the reasons that I was happy and excited to have you on the show and share, um, just kind of, uh, uh, closing up, like what if, if, if I'm a commercial agent, um, uh, and I'm sitting out or, or even, even a carrier, uh, I'm, I'm sitting out there listening to this show

and we do write comp and this, you know, we don't have a service like one, what are, what's like the one, two, three, whatever things that, that, you know, that really you should think about when you're considering and then I'll finish with, with how people can get ahold of you or triage now, if they're looking to learn more about you guys?

Yes.

So as a pullback view, And I'll finish with how people can get a hold of you or triage now if they're looking to learn more about you guys.

Yes.

So as a pullback view of the entire industry, anybody that's a major provider of this service does a pretty good job, right? You really can't go wrong if you don't have a triage service as an end user to put that service in place. As a broker or a carrier, obviously, now you're talking about

a business model and aligning with the right partner. You have to do a little shopping around

and a little homework, right? I mean, it's a big world, but it's a small industry, right?

WorkComp is pretty niche. And so lots of people talk, you can get anecdotal information and

industry stats and things like that by doing a little bit of digging. From a business perspective,

I'll see think you can go wrong. Because again, there's tremendous wins to be had on both sides of the coin.
And that is really what you as a service provider are looking to do. You're enhancing your relationship with that client.
You're bringing them a very valuable tool that is super cost-effective. And that just tightens the relationship that much more.
So that's, again, obviously I'm in sales. I mean, I want to acquire all the business that I can, but I never really talk bad about our competition because for the most part, again, the major players, the recognized names that provide this service all do a good job.
And that's why they've been around for almost 20 years or more. And we were the new guys that came along, you know, just short of 10 years ago.
There's a big barrier to entry to set up a medical call center and all that. So that's why there's not a ton of service providers that offer this service.
So if you do need to do some homework, it's not going to be an extensive process. There's four or five names that jump to the top all the time.
And you can kind of go through the process and determine who you feel would be your best partner to provide that service to your clients. Yeah.
So if someone's listening to this and they said, you know, we appreciate the political correctness, but we're sold. We love triage now.
It sounds great. We like what we're hearing.
How does someone who's listening to this learn more? Where do they go? Who do they reach out to? What are the next steps to start their research journey? So our website is simply triagenow.net. There's a lot of information there.
There's a couple of quick videos and information that you can download. We have some printer-friendly

marketing materials that if you want to have a discussion internally as a broker or as an end-user client, you can print that out, take it to the next management meeting and discuss the service and kind of have a good overview to start those conversations with. You can always reach out to me directly.
I do have a pretty fair amount of availability. I am up early.
I've got East Coast clients that I do stuff early in the day. And then being here in Arizona, we've got clients in Hawaii and on the West Coast as well.
So my cell phone's always on. You guys can always reach me there.
My email address is simply my first initial and last name. It's d-s-c-h-e-n-c-k at triagenow.net.
And the phone number is on the website. That 800 number rolls over to my cell phone.
So you can certainly reach me there as well. I'm happy to help, even if it's just, you know, an exploratory thing, answer some questions.
Hey, I talked to these other guys, you know, tell me how you do it differently, whatever. I'm here to assist in any way I can.
Awesome. And we'll have, um, we'll have all that contact information on the show notes for everyone too.
So if you just go to, if you forget all that and you don't want to, for some reason, don't want to go directly to triage now.net, you can check out, uh, just go to my site and you'll, you'll find it as well, but obviously recommend everyone go check it out i think um was it was excited to have you on because because we've seen the value of it um we actually are internally working on some processes to make our delivery of the service even you know more widespread throughout our client base as well as just how we how we explain it um to all the new customers that we're onboarding. And just excited to share what you guys are doing and a value-added service for the agents that listen.
And the people that listen to this show take what they do very seriously. And I think this is a service that everyone should consider.
It doesn't mean it's the right fit for you or it's something that you actually want but it's definitely something I would recommend everyone look into and and spend some time and at least get to know because as you grow or you may start to move into a market where adding a service like this is important and a true value add and uh and I'd love for them to have your name so I appreciate your time appreciate um you know you know, kind of breaking everything down for us. And it's been a, it's been a good time for me too.
My pleasure, Ryan. Thanks a lot.
Yeah. I'm here to help.
Like, you know, even as you said about, you know, with the sales approach, I mean, I'm not your national sales manager, but I'm certainly here to help as a resource when it comes to how to position this for clients and things like that. If you have a bunch of white collar companies, this probably isn't the best fit, but in the work

comp world, anybody that's employing people to do anything remotely physical, a triage service

is definitely worth exploring. Yeah.
It's awesome. Thank you, man.
My pleasure. Thanks again.

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