Widening the heart.
God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right, by David James Duncan. Triad Books. Like a cluster of traffic cops, insurance adjusters, and whiplash lawyers at a multicar pileup, writers of all sorts are trying to make sense of the dangerous intersection...

Wave of wireless in insurance: security and device management are key.
The plethora of standards and platforms governing wireless communications is enough to drive any sober-minded insurance industry manager batty. Take, for example, the following protocols: CDMA 1xRTT, CDMA 1XEVDO, CDPD, GPRS, iDEN. Those are just for public wireless networks. Let's not forget to mention the...

DE: C5-C7 comp claim six years post-accident: denial of benefits to nurse upheld by courts.
CASE FACTS: Lisa Tenaglia-Evans was employed by St. Francis Hospital as a registered nurse. On January 18, 1994, she sustained injuries while attempting to bathe a patient. As a result of the injuries, the hospital agreed to pay the nurse workers' compensation benefits during various periods in 1994 and...

Claims 2007: incremental progress: the coming year will be marked by "linear improvements" derived from the exploitation of known technologies, according to one analyst.
Perceptions have shifted markedly in the past 12 months concerning the risks and rewards of replacing core claims administration legacy systems, with the major variables in the claims systems replacement equation having changed. The new generation of claims administration software has proven to be viable, because it...

Medicare Recovery Audit Contracts raise hackles.
WASHINGTON -- Members of the Practicing Physician Advisory Council are asking if Medicare should do more to identify and correct underpayments. At a recent council meeting, PPAC members wanted to know why a new demonstration program from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rewards contractors financially...

Mary's mystery.
A 47-year-old, sedentary, overweight customer service representative began to wake up with numbness, first in one hand and then in both. She soon found herself shaking her hands out at work, where she typed all day while on the phone with a headset talking to customers. Her company had...

Everything you wanted to know about Christianity.
SOME PEOPLE in America are scared silly of Christianity, but many of the most frightened know very little about it. They throw around terms like fundamentalist and evangelical with very little knowledge of their meaning, and this is before they enter the dark thicket of Preterists, Amillennialists, Prelapsarian Arminian...

Stonewalled! A New Orleans real estate risk manager files a huge claim, only to find that settlement is still months away.
Perhaps Interstate Realty's Bill Geddes said it best. In the affordable homing developer/manager's 33-year history he never experienced a claim this massive--more than $30 million. The size dwarfed any previous claim the controller and risk manager had ever experienced by almost $25 million. From an adjuster's viewpoint...

Wading through the paper bog: when it comes to managing workers' compensation claims, timeliness is crucial. New technology is helping to reduce time spent on claims, drive down costs and improve outcomes.
For years, claims adjusters in the workers' compensation industry have been bogged down with excessive paperwork, hours of manual data entry, fragmented communication among all parties involved in a claim and compliance with numerous state reporting laws and regulations. Today, new technology is helping adjusters automate and...

No big bankrolls in conservatives' campaigns for school board seats.
Byline: Anne Williams The Register-Guard Swirling rumors about who may be bankrolling Springfield School Board challengers in the May 17 election appear to be groundless, based on contribution and expenditure reports filed with the Lane County Elections Division this week. According to the reports, which...