Participating dealerships report a 30% drop in workers' comp and disability claims. Here is why — and the two lines on your renewal letter where you will see it.
Workers’ comp renewal season at a dealership is not fun. Your carrier walks in with the loss run, points at the claims from the last three policy years, and explains why your modifier is trending the wrong direction. The soft-tissue claim from the tech who threw his back out pulling a transmission. The shoulder issue from the porter. The stress leave from the sales manager. Each one sits on your file for years.
What most dealers never connect is that a good chunk of those claims were preventable — not through a better safety poster, but through a workforce that was healthier before the incident happened. Ochs, Inc. reports a 30% reduction in workers’ comp and disability claims across participating Elysian dealerships. That is not a bolt-on risk-management program. That is what happens when a preventive-health benefit actually gets used.
Workers’ comp at a dealership is dominated by soft-tissue injuries: backs, shoulders, knees, necks. Those injuries do not happen to people at random. They happen disproportionately to employees who were already carrying something into the shop that morning — a chronic condition that was inflaming a joint, a muscle that was already tight from untreated stress, a flare-up from a condition that had not been managed because the tech had not seen a doctor in eighteen months.
When 94% of your team is participating in a plan with $0 co-pay telemedicine, routine access to a clinician, biometric screenings, and behavioral support, the story on the service-drive floor changes. Not because people stop pulling transmissions, but because the bodies pulling them are in better shape when they show up. That is the quiet mechanism.
Early detection catches chronic issues before they become acute events. The biometric and DNA screenings in the plan flag the blood pressure, the glucose levels, the inflammatory markers that would otherwise go unmanaged. A tech who is getting his blood pressure treated is less likely to have the dizzy spell on the lift. A tech whose back strain got addressed in week one with a telemedicine visit and a referral is less likely to be the tech whose back injury becomes the comp claim in week six.
Behavioral coaching reduces stress-driven incidents. A meaningful share of workplace injuries correlate with stress, fatigue, and distraction. Give your team a confidential behavioral-health network and the sales manager going through a divorce, the advisor whose parent is declining — they have somewhere to go before the distraction shows up as an incident on the drive.
Preventive visits catch soft-tissue issues while they are cheap. A technician with a nagging shoulder who gets a telemedicine visit and a referral to a physical therapist in week two is a different risk than the same tech in week twelve, when the nagging became an injury. More than 50 routine conditions are treatable via telemedicine at $0 co-pay, so there is no friction between the twinge and the appointment.
When your workers’ comp carrier builds your renewal, they look at two primary dimensions of your loss experience. Both are moved by a preventive plan, in slightly different ways.
Frequency is how often claims happen — the count on your loss run. A healthier workforce has fewer incidents, so frequency drops. Underwriters care about frequency because frequent claims, even small ones, signal underlying risk.
Severity is how expensive each claim is — the dollar amount on each line. An employee who is healthier going into an injury recovers faster, files a smaller claim, and returns to work sooner. Severity drops not because the incident did not happen, but because the recovery was cleaner.
When both frequency and severity move the right direction over a couple of policy years, your experience modifier follows. That is the number that multiplies your base premium, so even small movement in the right direction compounds across the whole policy. Your carrier will not always tell you why the modifier moved. You will know.
A 30% reduction in comp and disability claims is a program-level aggregate and individual dealer results will vary. What we consistently see is that the dealers who get their team onto a preventive plan with real participation start seeing movement on the claim ledger within the first full policy year, and the renewal conversation gets easier in year two and meaningfully better in year three.
This is the part of the ROI that does not show up on the Section 125 page or the telemedicine page. It shows up on the workers’ comp invoice, two renewals from now, when your broker hands you a number and you realize it went the right direction.
If you want to look at your current loss run with us and model what a preventive plan might do to your modifier, we will walk through it together.
Send us your loss run and we will walk through where the frequency and severity lift plausibly lands.
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