Welcome...
BMI is proud to present the launch of our E-newsletter tailored for BMI customers, colleagues, and friends.
We hope you find this informative and a useful tool for your work in the Behavioral Health Absence Management Field.
The American Psychiatric Foundation recently released foundational principals for assessing and
treating psychiatric occupational disability. The designer of these principles, the Partnership for Workplace Mental Health
Taskforce, consisted of members from absence management, mental health, corporations, insurance carriers and social security
administration. Their work was based on the following principles.
- Inability to work is a psychiatric crisis.
- Return to work is a fundamental goal of treatment, as it supports treatment and represents restoration of pre-morbid function.
- Occupational disability is a complex bio-psychosocial phenomenon.
- Symptoms are not impairments, and impairments are not disability.
Key Findings, Recommendations, and Actions
Although treating physicians understand mental status, very often they do not understand, nor have they been
trained to understand, functional status. In other words, they do not understand the functions that a patient regularly performed in
his or her job before becoming disabled with a psychiatric illness.
Principles of Treatment
- Early assessment is key to preventing or minimizing loss of function.
- Persons with mental health conditions and loss of work function require intensive treatment.
- Treatment should include a focus on return to function and work.
- Active collaboration and communication are vital to return to function and work.
- Clinicians should understand that illness and impairment can coexist with adequate occupational performance.
Use Disability Management Services!
- A third-party rehabilitation, vocational, or disability management provider contacts the employee after a set number of workdays have been
missed (e.g., five to ten), offering immediate assistance.
- The creation of red flags is an important and easy tool for case managers to recognize triggers that will indicate the need for
early intervention, not only in purely psychiatric cases, but also for physical claims with underlying psychiatric conditions.
- A fixed but relatively short period of absence triggers the employer or a third-party provider to contact the absent employee, the employee's
supervisor, and the employee’s physician or therapist. Using the information from these three points of contact, the employer or third-party provider
conducts a three-point return-to-work (RTW) assessment, reports the results of the RTW assessment to the employer and employee, develops a
return-to-work plan if appropriate, and initiates and monitors return to work.
BMI's take on the taskforce report:
All of us at BMI are excited about the release of this long awaited report. We will be using this report in our
peer to peer consultations with providers to address appropriate care and treatment, which mitigates prolonged disabilities. We recommend
you familiarize yourself with this document
(Download the FULL REPORT) and use as an appropriate reference
in your day to day work on individual cases.
New Key Personnel
Michael Coupland, CPsych, CRC joins BMI as a National Business Development Consultant. He has extensive experience in developing
disability evaluation tools including the AssessAbility Functional Medicine Evaluation (FME).
He wrote the course book on Functional Capacity Evaluation for the Virginia Commonwealth University/Medical College
of Virginia, serving as Adjunct Professor. He is active and visible in the Disability Management Community, having served on the Return to
Work Committee of the International Association of Industrial Accident Boards and Commissions (IAIABC), consulted to the Social Security
Administration on their Disability re-engineering process. Michael looks forward to meeting you and continuing BMI's tradition of
Building Bridges to Productivity.
Announcements!
Dean Knudson, Medical Director at BMI will be making two presentations in the month of October. On October 4, 2007, he will be speaking
at the DMEC Minnesota chapter conference in the Earl Browne Center in Minneapolis.
His keynote speech is entitled: The Psychiatric Triggering Point: Applying a Biopsychosocial Model
to Disability Management. His second presentation will be at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota on October 26.
Visit the Minnesota DMEC web site
Kate Harri, MA, LP, Vice-President of BMI (Workplace interventions), is invited speaker at International Claims Conference
October 23 - 25, 2007.
Visit the ICA conference web site
Mark Raderstorf, MA, LP, CCM, CRC, President of BMI, is an invited speaker at National Business Group on Health Conference October,
October 23 - 25, 2007. The title of the presentation is Proven Strategies for Behavioral Health Absence.
Visit the NBGH conference web site
Mark Raderstorf, BMI's president, and Jennifer Kurtz, PhD, BMI's Psych Quality Absence Manager, recently had a article published in the
Professional Case Management Journal entitled: Managing Mental Health Issues in the Workplace.
To obtain a copy of the article, please contact BMI at 952-927-0184, or
email us.
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