Welcome to the
Annual Insights Symposium (AIS) Highlights Report. Click the session titles below to access key insights, presentations, and videos.
The Source You Trust
Bill Donnell, CPCU |
President and CEO, NCCI
Bill kicked off
AIS 2023 with a perspective on the past, present, and future as NCCI celebrates its 100th year of service to the workers compensation industry.
State of the Line Report
Donna Glenn, FCAS, MAAA |
Chief Actuary, NCCI
NCCI’s
State of the Line provided an exclusive review of the workers compensation system. Donna delivered our latest analysis of financial indicators, trends, and broad economic markers. This highly anticipated session is unmatched in its detailed analysis of market conditions.
State of the Line Q&A With NCCI’s Experts
Donna Glenn, FCAS, MAAA |
Chief Actuary, NCCI
Dan Benzshawel, FCAS, MAAA |
Executive Director and Actuary, NCCI
Patrick Coate, PhD |
Economist II, NCCI
Carolyn Wise, ACAS, MAAA |
Manager and Associate Actuary, NCCI
Donna and her panel of experts answered questions submitted during the
State of the Line. This one-of-a-kind session offered unique insights and key takeaways that you won’t find anywhere else.
Managing Through the Talent Gap
Gregory P. Jacobson |
Co-Chief Executive Officer, The Jacobson Group
Jeff Rieder, CPA, CPCU, CLU® |
Partner, AON and Head of Ward Group
Gregory and Jeff shared their unique perspectives on our industry’s labor market, including a strategic view of human capital challenges, the realities of our new virtual/hybrid working world, the impact of retirements, and best practices for attracting and retaining new talent.
The Future of Medicine
Moderated by:
Jill Rosenthal, MD, MPH, MA, FACOEM |
SVP and Chief Medical Officer, Zenith Insurance, a Fairfax Financial Company
Panelists:
Michael Choo, MD, MBA, FACEP, FAAEM, CMRO |
Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President, Paradigm
Kenji Saito, MD, JD, FACOEM |
President and Chief Medical and Science Officer, LiveWell WorkWell, a MedLaw LLC company, and President, American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
Gerry Stanley, MD, P-CEO |
Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, Harvard MedTech
This distinguished panel of experts in occupational medicine revealed trending medical procedures and technological advances enhancing the lives of injured workers. From cutting-edge resuscitation to virtual reality trauma treatment, they journeyed into the future of medicine and how it may impact workers compensation.
Keynote: It Starts With Ideas
Malcolm Gladwell
Author of six New York Times
bestsellers and host of the popular podcast Revisionist History
Malcolm explored how ideas are spread, the architecture of split-second decision-making, and the roots of success.
Under the Microscope: Medical Trends in Comp
Leonard F. Herk, PhD |
Executive Director and Senior Economist, NCCI
Carolyn Wise, ACAS, MAAA |
Manager and Associate Actuary, NCCI
Len and Carolyn provided a tour of medical services in workers compensation as they unveiled the anatomy of change in medical costs and looked beyond inflation. Our experts explored the systemic changes that were drivers of the recent past and shed light on today’s medical trend engine.
Large Claims Deconstructed
Raji H. Chadarevian |
Executive Director—Actuarial Research, NCCI
Anae Myers, ACAS, MAAA |
Associate Actuary, NCCI
Severely injured workers are an ongoing concern for the workers compensation industry. Raji and Anae revealed the characteristics of these injuries, underlying frequency trends, and associated cost drivers.
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Bill Donnell, CPCU
President and CEO, NCCI
Bill Donnell is President and Chief Executive Officer of NCCI, a trusted source of workers compensation information. Under his leadership, NCCI serves nearly 40 state governments and more than 900 insurance carriers, providing data, insights, tools, and services that foster a healthy workers compensation system.
Donnell is an accomplished executive leader with more than three decades of industry experience specializing in property/casualty (P/C) insurance/reinsurance in both global and domestic US leadership roles. Prior to joining NCCI, he was president of Swiss Re’s US P/C reinsurance business. Currently, he serves on the board of the Community Foundation of Palm Beach and Martin counties. He is a noted insurance industry subject-matter expert and speaker.
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Donna Glenn, FCAS, MAAA
Chief Actuary, NCCI
Donna Glenn leads the Actuarial & Economic Services Division. Her team helps maintain a healthy workers compensation system through the design and delivery of all actuarial and economic work at NCCI. The team produces rate/loss cost filings and conducts legislative analyses, compiles and analyzes insurance industry results, establishes residual market reserves, and creates actuarial tools, analytics, and research.
Prior to this, Glenn led casualty product and underwriting for the national insurance business segment at Liberty Mutual, where she oversaw workers compensation strategy for both guaranteed cost and loss sensitive business. She has also held positions at The Hartford, Travelers, and Deloitte, with focus areas ranging across product management, pricing strategy including predictive analytics, business intelligence, and data management.
Glenn graduated from Quinnipiac College with a bachelor of science in computer science and mathematics and completed Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program. She is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society (FCAS) and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries (MAAA). She previously represented Liberty Mutual on several industry boards including the New York Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau (NYCIRB), the Pennsylvania Compensation Rating Bureau (PCRB), the Minnesota Workers' Compensation Insurers Association (MWCIA), and the Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI).
Glenn was named a Woman to Watch by Business Insurance magazine in 2020 for her contributions to the workers compensation industry and for mentoring women throughout her career. Glenn serves on the board of the United Way of Palm Beach County and the board of IMPACT 100—a nonprofit organization run by women to support the local community.
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Carolyn Wise, ACAS, MAAA
Manager and Associate Actuary, NCCI
Carolyn Wise joined NCCI in 2015 and has worked in a variety of areas including Legislative Analysis, Reserving, Data Analytics, and products and results. She currently leads the Actuarial Communications focus area.
Prior to beginning her career at NCCI, she worked in personal lines pricing. She attained both her undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Arizona. She is an Associate of the Casualty Actuarial Society and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries.
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Anae Myers, ACAS, MAAA
Associate Actuary
Anae Myers joined NCCI in 2012 after graduating with a BA in mathematics from Florida Atlantic University (FAU). After she became an Associate of the Casualty Actuary Society, her interest in mathematics led her back to FAU to pursue a PhD in harmonic analysis and interpolation theory. She returned to NCCI in 2020 and enjoys the challenge of applying her mathematical training to research opportunities.
Myers is currently finishing her dissertation. She remains involved in the mathematics community and mentoring initiatives for women and girls in mathematics.
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Leonard F. Herk, PhD
Executive Director and Senior Economist
Leonard F. Herk is Executive Director and Senior Economist at NCCI and focus lead for Economic Research. His research has involved risk measurement and the cost of capital in the context of ratemaking, the effects of the Affordable Care Act, and interstate variations in medical treatment for workers compensation claims.
Before joining NCCI in 2013, Herk worked at several investment funds in New York specializing in event-driven investing and private equity. Prior to that, he taught economics as a faculty member at Florida State, Tulane, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia universities. He has been published in the Journal of Economic Theory and the RAND Journal of Economics.
Herk holds a PhD in economics from the University of Virginia and an MS in computational finance from Carnegie Mellon University.
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Raji H. Chadarevian
Executive Director—Actuarial Research
With over 30 years of experience in insurance, Raji Chadarevian currently leads a team of research actuaries and experts to provide Thought Leadership in workers compensation. Prior to this, he led the Medical Regulations and Informatics team at NCCI, making him NCCI’s primary actuarial expert on matters relating to medical data and workers compensation health informatics. Prior to 2012, he was responsible for several state rate filings in the western region.
Chadarevian is the principal author of “How Is Medical Inflation Measured? And Why Should I Care?” and “Killer Pain Relief: Opioids in Workers Compensation.” He is the principal author of “Gen Rx-The Next Generation of Medicine,” which he presented at NCCI’s virtual Annual Issues Symposium in 2020. Most recently, he authored articles on COVID-19’s impact on medical treatment and medical inflation in workers compensation.
Chadarevian received a bachelor of science in mathematics from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He is the recipient of the 2020 IAIABC Award of Merit.
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Robert P. Hartwig, PhD, CPCU
Clinical Associate Professor of Finance, Darla Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina
Robert Hartwig is Clinical Associate Professor of Finance and Co-Director of the Risk and Uncertainty Management Center. His research focuses on insurance markets and structures, risk management, risk-bearing capital market instruments, the financing of technology risks, and venture capital in insurance markets. He makes frequent presentations to insurance industry management, boards of directors, regulators, and legislators.
Prior to joining the Darla Moore School of Business, he was president and economist for the Insurance Information Institute in New York. In prior positions, Hartwig worked for Swiss Re, the National Council on Compensation Insurance, and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. He has also served as an adjunct professor at Florida Atlantic University. His professional experience includes expert witness testimony and testimony before numerous congressional and state legislative committees. He holds the Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter credential and speaks frequently in the media on all issues related to insurance markets.
Hartwig has a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois.
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Malcolm Gladwell
Author of six New York Times bestsellers and host of the popular podcast Revisionist History
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of six New York Times bestsellers—The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, and Talking to Strangers. He has been named one of the 100 most influential people by TIME magazine and one of the Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.
Gladwell’s newest book is the audiobook Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon. Published by Pushkin Industries, Gladwell and co-author Bruce Headlam recorded over 30 hours of conversation with Simon. The result is an intimate audio biography of one of America’s most popular songwriters. Brimming with music and conversation, Miracle and Wonder is a window into Simon’s legendary career, what it means to be alive as an artist, and how to create work that endures.
His book The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War was inspired by a four-part series about General Curtis LeMay on his podcast Revisionist History. In it, Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.
He has explored how ideas spread in The Tipping Point, decision making in Blink, and the roots of success in Outliers. With his latest book, David and Goliath, he examines our understanding of advantages of disadvantages, arguing that we have underestimated the value of adversity and over-estimated the value of privilege.
Gladwell is the host of a 10-part weekly podcast, Revisionist History. In it, he reexamines an overlooked or misunderstood aspect of past events. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has won a national magazine award and been honored by the American Psychological Society and the American Sociological Society. He was previously a reporter for The Washington Post. Gladwell is an extraordinary speaker: always on target, aware of the context and the concerns of the audience, informative and practical, poised, eloquent, warm, and funny. He has an unsurpassed ability to be both entertaining and challenging.
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Gregory P. Jacobson
Co-Chief Executive Officer, The Jacobson Group
Gregory P. Jacobson is Co-Chief Executive Officer of The Jacobson Group, the leading US executive search and staffing firm to the insurance industry. He is also known industry wide as an investor, board member, and influencer. Jacobson has assisted countless insurance companies, large and small, early stage and traditional, in achieving their goals by acquiring talented executives to drive their organizations forward. He has successfully led searches for critical senior-level disciplines including CEOs, COOs, CIOs, CFOs, and independent directors.
He contributes to many regional and national insurance events, including those of AM Best, American Property and Casualty Insurers Association, Medical Professional Liability Association, and the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, among others. He is considered an expert on the industry's labor market and has often been called upon to share his perspectives on the industry’s talent outlook, human capital strategic planning, and talent acquisition. He has been a featured columnist in Best’s Review and regularly contributes his insights with periodicals such as Carrier Management, Financial Times, Insurance Business America, Insurance Journal, and LOMA’s Resource.
Jacobson is currently on the board of the 1970 Group, a specialty financing company supporting the insurance industry. He has served as a board member of the National Insurance Industry Council for the City of Hope and the Chicago Sinfonietta, the nation’s most diverse orchestra. Additionally, he was a driving force behind the creation of the Insurance Careers Movement and continues to be an active supporter of the grassroots movement inspiring young people to pursue insurance careers. He is also a member of YPO, an exclusive global leadership community of chief executives. He graduated from Illinois State University with a degree in violin performance.
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Michael Choo, MD, MBA, FACEP, FAAEM, CMRO
Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President, Paradigm
Michael Choo, MD, MBA, FACEP, FAAEM, CMRO, is Paradigm’s Chief Medical Officer. He maintains the company’s relationships with its network of consulting physicians and centers of excellence and is responsible for enhancing clinical operations and leading outcomes research and development. He also teaches residents in emergency medicine, internal medicine, and family medicine at Wright State Boonshoft School of Medicine. In addition, he serves as a senior oral board examiner for the American Board of Emergency Medicine.
Dr. Choo has more than 30 years of experience as a clinician, academician, and healthcare executive. Before coming to Paradigm, he was president and CEO of CHM Regional Health System in Wilmington, Ohio, where he oversaw its transition from a county owned nonprofit to a private equity funded for-profit hospital. He was the medical director of Heart Emergency Center at Dayton Heart & Vascular Hospital, chief of emergency and outpatient medicine at Clinton Memorial Hospital, and director of an occupational health clinic network and a hyperbaric medicine and wound center. He also was founder and CEO of an emergency medicine physician group, Professional Emergency Specialists of Southern Ohio, for 20 years.
Dr. Choo has his BA and MD from Boston University’s accelerated six-year honors program in medicine, as well as an MBA from the University of Tennessee’s Haslam Graduate School of Business. He is a senior oral board examiner for the American Board of Emergency Medicine, a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians, and a fellow and board member of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine.
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Jeff Rieder, CPA, CPCU, CLU®
Partner, AON and Head of Ward Group
Jeff Rieder is a Partner at Aon plc with overall leadership for the Ward insurance benchmarking programs. He has significant experience in the insurance industry with expertise in the property/casualty and life segments. Throughout his 29-year career, he has been involved with over 600 projects for numerous domestic and international insurance companies, covering a diverse range of performance and strategic evaluations. Rieder leads the firm’s Ward’s 50, which analyzes the financial performance of every property/casualty and life-health insurance company in the US and identifies the top performers in each segment. Prior to joining Ward in 1998, he spent five years at Great American Insurance Company working in the corporate finance departments.
Rieder has a bachelor of science degree in accounting and international business certification from the University of Cincinnati. He is a Certified Public Accountant, Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter, and Chartered Life Underwriter.
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Jill Rosenthal, MD, MPH, MA, FACOEM
SVP and Chief Medical Officer, Zenith Insurance, a Fairfax Financial Company
Jill Rosenthal, MD, MPH, MA, FACOEM, is the Chief Medical Officer at The Zenith Insurance Company and has been with Zenith since June 2010. Dr. Rosenthal received her BA from Duke University where she also earned a certificate in the biopsychosocial approach to health and human development. She received her MD, MPH, and MA from the University of Illinois. She is board certified in occupational medicine and licensed in Florida, California, and Texas.
Dr. Rosenthal has served as the medical director for General Motors, Evanston-Northwestern Hospital’s Employee Health Department, and two Johnson & Johnson companies, Cordis and Microtyping Solutions. She is the treasurer of and on the board of directors for the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and is chair of ACOEM’s JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion) committee. Dr. Rosenthal is an affiliate assistant professor at the University of South Florida Occupational Medicine Residency Program. Florida’s Surgeon General appointed her to a second term on the Florida Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Foundation board of directors and she is the chair of its executive committee.
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Gerry Stanley, MD, P-CEO
Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, Harvard MedTech
Gerry Stanley, MD, P-CEO, is the Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for Harvard MedTech and has a passion for healthcare transformation. Dr. Stanley has deep expertise in healthcare IT, population health management, self-insured health plan management, medical consumerism, and direct-to-employer network enablement.
As a third-generation family physician, he has grown up in the evolution of healthcare delivery systems and is an active proponent of utilizing data and analytics to educate clinicians about the power of managing patient populations one clinical interaction at a time. He describes the opportunity to find a solution for the growing opioid epidemic and mental health crisis by creating a resource for clinicians to treat patients wholistically as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to solve a societal need.”
Most recently, Dr. Stanley served as the chief medical officer for the employer and consumer division of Cerner. While at Cerner, he developed a value-based care and population health strategy for critical access hospitals, community hospitals, and a framework for health plan development for integrated delivery networks. He also had responsibility for Cerner’s national system of on-site and near-site health centers/pharmacies/occupational centers serving self-insured employers, care coordination teams, a national team of corporate wellness strategists, an analytics division, a third-party administrator, and the self-insured and direct-to-employer insurance strategies for Cerner clients.
He has a unique ability to identify market-specific opportunities for development, stabilization, and growth. He believes that a collaborative approach and strong foundational understanding of healthcare delivery, health systems, insurance brokers/consultants, and self-insured employers is critical to scale health plans and achieve the quadruple AIM of healthcare.
Dr. Stanley received his undergraduate degree from Creighton University studying classical and near Eastern civilizations and graduating magna cum laude. He then attended the Creighton University School of Medicine where he served as class president for three years, graduated with clinical honors, and received the university’s highest honor, the Spirit of Creighton award. He completed his residency at the Northern Colorado Family Medicine Program with a focus on rural and surgical family medicine. He practiced medicine for over 10 years in a variety of practice settings and group/hospital leadership positions before attending the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and graduating from the physician CEO program.
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Kenji Saito, MD, JD, FACOEM
President and Chief Medical and Science Officer, LiveWell WorkWell, a MedLaw LLC company and President, American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
Kenji Saito, MD, JD, FACOEM, is President and Chief Medical and Science Officer of LiveWell WorkWell, a MedLaw company President of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and past president of the New England College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
As assistant clinical professor at Dartmouth College, the University of New England, and on faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, Dr. Saito enjoys training the next generation of leaders in occupational health, well-being, leadership and organizational development, digital health, innovation, data analytics, entrepreneurship, medico-legal consultation, and bioethics.
Growing up as a sushi chef in a small family business kindled his entrepreneurial spirit. He is currently involved with several startups in digital and virtual well-being, culinary, and lifestyle medicine platforms in the Boston and Las Vegas areas and with environmental remediation technology in the Miami area. He is also a consultant for employee health and wellness for several national and global companies in the consumer products, marketing, transportation, manufacturing, and nutraceutical/pharmaceutical industries and works with various government and regulatory agencies.
As a physician, he continues to practice clinical occupational health, seeing pilots as a senior medical examiner for the FAA. As an attorney, he is barred in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. During his spare time, he enjoys serving as one of the founding board members for Kids’ Chance of Maine, the Maine Medical Association, and is house delegate to the American Medical Association.
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Dan Benzshawel, FCAS, MAAA
Executive Director and Actuary, NCCI
Dan Benzshawel is an Executive Director and Actuary in NCCI’s Actuarial & Economic Services Division. Benzshawel is NCCI’s Aggregate Ratemaking Focus Lead, supervising NCCI’s annual loss cost/rate filings across nearly 40 jurisdictions. He is also a state actuary for Iowa, New Mexico, and Texas. Benzshawel joined NCCI in 2012 and has worked in a variety of areas including Ratemaking, Reserving, Data Quality, individual risk rating research, and research of actuarial methods.
He is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries. He earned BS degrees in actuarial science and mathematics and a BA degree in finance from the University of Iowa.
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Patrick Coate, PhD
Economist II, NCCI
Patrick Coate joined NCCI in 2017 in the Economic Research focus area. He previously worked as a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center.
He earned a PhD in economics from Duke University and a BS in mathematics from the University of Dayton.