By: Nic Hayes
Teamwork makes the dream work – a cliché phrase you’ve probably heard time and time again since the tee-ball days. However, when it comes to total worker health, the partnership between Medcor and Work Right NW truly does make that dream work.
Meet the Team
Medcor was founded in 1984. Since then, they have been developing and bringing employers onsite and telehealth medical solutions focused on occupational health as well as urgent care and primary care. Medcor takes care of minor things onsite or via telemedicine allowing companies and their benefit plans to focus their resources on issues that need specialists and offsite care. Additionally, they do not bill insurance claims, but they do have a close integration and impact on insurance costs.
Work Right puts emphasis on prevention by using a sports medicine model treating employees as working athletes. Their team of athletic trainers, physical therapists, and sports medicine professionals work to keep employees healthy and on the job. Similar to Medcor, Work Right impacts worker’s compensation claims without directly billing insurance and trying to care for the worker, ideally before they know they have anything going on.
The Partnership
In business, the question is often buy or build when it comes to expansion – both of which require significant amounts of time, resources, and capital. Even without these costs, business expansion is tricky, especially when it comes to a new, different space because it is challenging for businesses to multi-focus well. With it being difficult for businesses to multi-focus well, competent businesses hyper-focus on what they do well, and that played a major role in the partnership between Medcor and Work Right.
The Medcor and Work Right partnership began because they were both exceptionally good at what they respectively did. After being independently sourced by mutual clients and working on the same sites over the last few years, the relationship, in a way, developed naturally, and overtime that working relationship formalized to become the partnership it is today.
Work Right CEO Nic Patee added, “When trying to build for the future, sometimes things just become clear. That was the case with the partnership with Medcor and Work Right. We were collaborating at numerous different customer locations, and we were able to see unique synergy between our groups and the mission we collectively serve. Formal partnership just extended this naturally developing collaboration.”
Even though both companies have some overlap in what they do, their collaborative nature allowed them to organically integrate each other’s services in a way that provides positive outcomes for everyone involved. Through the partnership, each company is hyper-focused on the area they are best at – Medcor being really good at putting nurses and physicians on site as well as handling the treatment, return to work, referral management, OSHA surveillance, and urgent care and Work Right being really good at prevention and keeping workers healthy and able to stay on the job – but they have joined forces to provide the best total care possible.
In partnering, Medcor and Work Right are bringing a solution that is flexible to the needs of the market. Even though they are better together, if a company were to want just one of the solutions, then they can provide that one solution as that may be what is best or required for that specific organization.
Detailing the solution presented by the benefit, Nic Patee said, “The partnership is tailored around bringing a combined offering of disciplines from full-scale medical offerings with on-site medical to cutting edge human performance assessments on the front-end, and everything in between. These services drive an all-inclusive program that cares for an employee from hire to retire."
Total Worker Health
For a partnership to be successful, both parties must employ a common approach. Medcor and Work Right both take an evidence-based approach to medicine as well as being data driven. With this approach, they are both concerned with their results as a solution wanting to bring about a ROI.
In order to do this, they put the workers first by communicating with them, understanding their needs, and simply taking the time to listen. To truly do this, their work is not limited to the clinic in which they work; instead, they are on the work site, on the floor, in the manufacturing line looking for opportunities and improving body mechanics and looking at ergonomics. When there is an injury or illness or OSHA surveillance program, then workers are coming into the clinic and being properly treated and cared for so that they can get back to work.
Most importantly, Medcor and Work Right treat people, not injuries. Looking at the whole worker allows them to provide a benefit that goes beyond just the health of workers. Their bilateral protocols allow them to treat less serious things onsite and prevent them from becoming worse, and on the other hand, for things more serious, they can refer employees to outside facilities, within the plan, that can come back to them creating a broader effective continuum for the worker. Additionally, having onsite services allows workers to receive care without leaving work preventing their pay from being interrupted, and employees also don’t have to worry about deductibles and copays, just getting better.
The partnership between Medcor and Work Right truly brings the best together. Tyler Gilmore, Work Right Chief Operating Officer, said, "Work Right and Medcor have the drive and passion to be the best in each of our respective fields. I think of this formal partnership much like putting two high caliber athletes together to train. They push each other. They demand and expect the best out of each other. By doing this we are providing our clients and their team members with the best possible care and customer service each and every day."
Be sure to listen to the episode of The Granite List Live featuring Curtis Smith and Nic Patee.
We are proud to feature Work Right NW on the Granite List.
