Early intervention on the day of injury is critical. By contacting Hills Street Group on the day of the injury (via website, email or hotline), you can initiate appropriate treatment and injury management immediately, thus minimising management error and cost.

Although many injuries are minor and require only minimal intervention, some injuries can be vulnerable to progression to long term (chronic) disability. Our professional team are skilled at identifying this vulnerability and can determine and implement preventative strategies.

The progression to long term (chronic) injuries is usually related to Psycho-Social factors, also known as Yellow Flags.
Hills Street Group can work with your organisation to identify these factors (or flags) and to develop strategies to manage them.
For example, the empowerment of injured workers, and their supervisors, to take an active role in their rehabilitation is more effective than a focus on symptomatic treatment.

Hills Street Group understands the importance of preserving the relationships between employer, worker, insurer and doctor. We have developed an evidence based system of identifying and managing the psycho-social factors, and the relationships, that contribute to successful return to work outcomes.

There are an overwhelming number of stakeholders involved in the management of a workplace injury.
Stakeholders include -

• the injured worker
• the injured worker’s family & social network
• the employer (including workmates, supervisor, payroll etc)
• insurer (if not self insured)
• doctor
• specialist
• health professionals (physiotherapist, chiropractor, occupational therapist, psychologist etc)

Each of these stakeholders has a different focus and their own jargon. Often, the communication between them is adversarial or ineffective, as each stakeholder struggles to manage their daily priorities.

Hills Street Group’s professional injury managers are experienced at facilitating and co-ordinating this communication process. This is our “strong suit”.

For example, Hills Street Group can assist in the development of relationships between an organisation’s branches and local doctors. This can enhance the decision making process with respect to suitable duties options. Without this relationship, a doctor will typically be more conservative in their certification of an injured worker, which can prolong the return to work process.

Injury management is typically considered in relative isolation from claims management. The separation of the administration of a claim and the management of the injured worker can lead to uninformed decision making.

With guidance from Hills Street Group, employers can regain some control of the process that determines their rehabilitation outcomes and therefore, their workers compensation premiums. Our approach focuses on the relative strengths of the various stakeholder relationships and seeks to develop and maintain their quality. By fostering a proactive relationship between the employer and insurer, an integrated claims and injury management system is developed. We can even manage your payroll claims administration offsite.

Evidence tells us that relationships in the return to work process typically become adversarial. Hills Street Group uses a relationship based approach that maps and considers the relative strengths of the relationships in order to minimise conflict and gain consensus.

As a result, claims and injury management decisions are taken with a better understanding and appreciation of all of the factors that influence injury management.

KPIs abound within the claims and injury management industries. Hills Street Group believes that many of the KPIs are reliable but not valid. That is, they are easily measured and collected but don’t necessarily measure what they set out to.

From a financial standpoint, it is hard to bypass the annual claims cost or premium as a KPI. However, the challenge remains to quantify the indirect costs associated with loss of productivity, employee substitution and the administration of injury management. In addition, the cultural and social costs (or savings) to an organisation are difficult to measure and quantify.

Hills Street Group has developed a systematic approach to identifying and establishing the KPIs that measure an organisation’s injury management performance (IMP). This process considers performance at a financial, administrative and cultural level and allows your organisation to track its injury management performance.