Health-Care IT: Online Tools Assess Return-To-Work ReadinessHealth-Care IT: Online Tools Assess Return-To-Work Readiness

When patients are recuperating from injuries or illness, their readiness to return to work will vary from individual to individual, based on their jobs. For instance, a young office clerk who undergoes back surgery may be well enough to return to work weeks earlier than an older construction worker who has the same operation.

Cigna Group Insurance is providing doctors with online tools to help them assess the readiness of their patients to return to work, as well as make it easier for physicians to provide all the information that's needed by Cigna for the insurance company to process patients' disability claims.

"The objective is to shorten the decision time it takes to process the claims and--bottom line--get payments to patients sooner," says Colleen McMurray, director of product development at Cigna Group Insurance and the creator of the new Physician Disability Toolkit.

In the past, the processes involved with doctors completing patients' short- or long-term disability forms involved a pingpong-game of papers being faxed or mailed to Cigna, with Cigna often requesting additional information or forms from the doctors, slowing Cigna's ability to make a patient claim decision and payment, McMurray says.

The Toolkit includes a Web site that lets doctors access forms online, as well as tools to help the physician assess a patient's physical and psychological impairment--such as whether a patient can sit, walk, or concentrate. The site also provides the physician with information about particular occupations, job descriptions, and job-demand analysis.

"Often, doctors don't know what kind of work a patient does," says McMurray, a former nurse. Also, doctors and patients often don't know the difference between workers' compensation, nonoccupational disability, and short- or long-term disability, which often results in a physician's office providing incomplete medical information to Cigna and even a patient who ends up staying out of work longer than necessary, she says.

The Cigna toolkit helps make these claims processes more efficient for physicians' offices, as well as for Cigna, she says. "Physicians and their office staffs are busy. We want to get the right information to the right person at the right time," McMurray says. "People don't have a lot of mind space for this stuff."