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2021 Innovation Awards: Sedgwick’s Response to Senate Bill 1159

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2021 Innovation Awards

Sedgwick
Sedgwick’s Response to Senate Bill 1159

To follow the spread of COVID-19, California enacted Senate Bill 1159 in September 2020. The bill made every employer responsible for reporting those employees testing positive for the disease to their claims administrator within three days, retroactive to July 6, 2020, and effective until Jan. 20, 2023. Organizations that do not meet the requirements face stiff fines for noncompliance.

The law’s definition of an outbreak is explicit: “Positive cases at a particular location and within a specific time frame,” said Leah Cooper, managing director, global consumer technology, at Sedgwick Claims Management Services Inc. in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “It wasn’t simple to compute, because every day there might be another case to be added. And the Senate Bill also required employers to use the number of employees that worked at a location to determine an outbreak.”

The precise mandates and complexities of the law prompted Sedgwick to develop its Response to Senate Bill 1159, a winner of a Business Insurance 2021 Innovation Award, as a reporting tool for its clients in California. 

“This is where Sedgwick had a unique opportunity to combine the need for innovative technology with a history of strong business process and expertise,” Ms. Cooper said. “We were able to leverage a brand-new platform, called our Global Intake Platform.”

To date, more than 2,000 organizations have used the tool in multiple industries, including transportation, retail and health care.

To access the intake portal, clients were assigned unique access codes, said Jennifer DeSmedt, vice president, client services. 

Training was also provided to clients and Sedgwick staff, she said. “We needed to be sure everyone was aware of the bill and what solution we had for them. So, when a client logs into the platform, they are providing the basic information required by the law,” Ms. DeSmedt said.

Sedgwick clients have information available to them on a daily basis regarding cases that have been reported for their organization and which ones potentially fall into an outbreak situation, she said.

The technology has been central for risk managers  because of the difficulty in accurately tracking the information, “especially since some risk management departments may not work with their benefits team or their health care management team,” Ms. Cooper said. “They needed a solution to be able to input that information and to track it.”

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