Otter River building will be razed.
Byline: Shirley Barnes TEMPLETON -The smallest town Christmas tree in front of the former Otter River Town Offices and School might stand alone after this year, because selectmen have voted to demolish the building. The building at 9 Main St. had been closed for several...

Robert O. Baker, 81.
SHREWSBURY Robert O. Baker, 81, a resident of Christopher Heights, Worcester and formerly of Shrewsbury and Quincy, died Monday, May 14th in the UMass Memorial Hospital, Worcester. His wife, Jean D. (Doig) Baker died in 1995. He leaves his three children, Craig H. Baker of...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This crime settlement ought to be a crime. (Property).
Standardization is an advantage shared by a lot of the insurance coverages risk managers buy. It means that claims adjusters have fewer forms to master, so they ought to be able to settle claims quickly and fairly. Unfortunately it doesn't always work that way, and when things go wrong...

Luhrsen and Walsh, LLC: a merger of the area's prestigious personal injury firms. (Advertising Feature: Legal Profile).
People come to Luhrsen and Walsh, LLC when something bad has happened, and this newly merged personal injury firm works to turn the worst of situations around. "Our clients know we're their last, best hope," says attorney Jeff Luhrsen, the firm's chief executive officer. "We're able to...