So I'm just, yeah, to be clear, we end, our session ends at 11.45, and that's counting questions. Yeah, I went through my talk for 18 minutes. Okay. 20 minutes max. Yeah. So hopefully. So we should be done before 11.20. Yeah. So I think we'll be okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even if we start a couple minutes late. Yep. I usually like to hear this dissipation noise. Sure. I don't know. Go ahead and get started. You ready? Yeah. All right. Good morning, everyone. We'll go ahead and get started. I'm sure there are a few more that are still working on grabbing some coffee or other refreshments, but we'll go ahead and get started. I'd like to welcome those of you in attendance, both in person and online, to this session of AOHC. We are representing the Excellence in Corporate Health Achievement Award Committee, myself and Dr. Yarborough. So we're excited to be presenting this session on which health and safety award is right for your organization. To briefly introduce myself, my name is Captain or Dr. Nate Jones. I am an active duty occupational medicine physician in the United States Air Force Medical Corps. Currently work at Robbins Air Force Base in central Georgia. You know, we're a heavy industry base, but also have some health promotion and obviously a lot of safety concerns that we deal with there. I've been on the Excellence in Corporate Health Achievement Award Committee for the last two years. It's been a great experience for me. Definitely been able to bring a lot of the special interests that I developed during residency into ergonomics and workplace well-being to bear in this committee and definitely benefited a lot from many of the more senior members who have been at this longer than I have. So with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Yarborough to introduce himself and start our presentation. Hello, everyone, and it's a pleasure to be here today. I'm Charles Yarborough. I will be in two days the current Corporate Health Achievement Award Chair for the committee. I was on the committee as a chair several years ago for a number of years as well. Actually, I'm returning in my post-career here. My career has included 36 years in AECOM, and about a third of that has been either on the Board of Directors or as president. I was president from 2017 to 2018. So about a third of my career has been involved with it, but almost all of it has been involved with the Corporate Health Achievement Award. So I've seen this undergo a long transition, and it was a task force created back in 1995 or 1994, maybe. It was during Dr. Kent Peterson's, who's speaking elsewhere. He's going to be here later. During his presidency, actually, and it was actually the thought came out of the Public Affairs Council. It says, how can there be something that could make organizations want to understand and learn and subscribe to occupational medicine for their organizations? Somebody came up with the idea of awards. With that, I had just finished my master's thesis on quality in occupational medicine, which I had done when I was at Exxon because they were big into quality improvement at that point. He called me up, and I got started on the task force and have been involved ever since, and it's been a great journey, and it's not over. We got some seed money from a number of corporations, and then the largest ever grant came in that ACOM ever got, and it was $250,000, and this is 1990 dollars. So you can imagine what it is now from GSK. We were able to get this kicked off. It's been a fantastic program ever since. I'll jump right into the next slide. It's just three objectives here. One is to demonstrate an understanding. I'm going to try to get that across about what we call the E Corporate Health Achievement Award Criterion Process. E, little e, stands for excellence. That's something we added so people can understand what this is about. I will kick off by saying David Hume, who you may know, was an 18th century philosopher, a very famous one, and he said a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence, and this award is nothing if it's not about evidence. So I think that really holds true. The second would be to identify the benefits of this award compared to other awards, so I'll touch on that because we looked at that, and describe the key messaging to engage organizational leadership to support an application. Well, hi, Kent. I mentioned you as a men to go, so acknowledge Kent. So we'll move on to the next slide. So we really did want to focus on you as a member to how it helps members in their daily dives and pursuits. Well, first of all, it translates the ACOM scope of occupational environmental health programs and practice, which is really a good read, which is over 10 years ago, but into an operational framework, and that's the key. How do you operationalize this huge amounts of information that you'll be getting, and it kind of rushes in? I found this extremely helpful, and many have as well. Put it into a framework and make it work. It's great to have great ideas, but if you can't execute and you can't show you're executing, what are you doing, really? You could be doing good things, but they're never really recognized. Promote the leadership role of occupational health professionals. Everyone in this room, you are the leadership. And how do you promote that? And we'll talk about that. And I think one of the biggest things I'm extremely proud about, and I know Kent would say this too, and all the members of the committee is that we have a treasure trove of honed tools to help at any stage. So I would advise you to go to www.chaa.org, and you will find amazing amounts of information, and it gives you a broad scope of things you need to be thinking about and some examples, and it's just everything you'd like to see. It also provides outreach and mentoring, which is a key to all this. For the next generations behind us, we need to transfer this information and how to do it. This is practical. So most importantly, though, it is an educational process. It was always an educational process. It has never been anything but an educational process, even though it's called an award. It's all about educating leadership, educating ourselves, and educating about how to get better at what we do. So the current committee members, half of the committee members are new this year. There's a new process at ACOM that you may know of where people submitted applications to want to become on a particular committee, and then there was a group, a selection committee, that actually figured out who everyone would be. I had input, the former chair had input, but basically it was that committee putting together. So now we have four new members, which is great. Obviously Nate's there, but I'll be the chair. David Cathcart will be the vice chair, and you can see other members there. So we're very pleased. It's a new committee, really, in a way. So I think it's a great opportunity. I feel very privileged to have been asked to chair this. But I have to say thank you, and with mixed emotion about saying goodbye, but a big thank you. Liz Jennison deserves, she was the prior chair, outgoing chair. She has done a phenomenal job re-positioning, re-thinking, getting new ideas about the award process. And during a time of COVID, I can't think of a worse time to try to get anybody to do awards. And frankly, that was an issue because everybody is busy handling COVID. So hopefully that's a little bit behind us now. We may be going into an endemic, but organizations have been just overwhelmed. So maybe we start coming back and say, okay, let's get back onto our usual track of providing quality care and programs to the workers. And we've seen this particularly in health care workers with COVID. I mean, this has been a time where people have recognized you've got to have good occupational health programs across the board. We see companies adding on corporate medical directors for the first time in years. And why? Because of COVID. It won't continue, but we need to take time and say, okay, we're ready to go. And we've got the tools. We're ready to go. Melissa Bean is retiring, and she's been fantastic. She's been writing documents for a number of years, helping with those. And I would hate to see her go, but she's retiring. Kent, who has been, as I said, the father, I think, of the award. He asked me to be part of it, and I was tremendously grateful that he had to mentor me. And it's been probably the longest-running program you can imagine, one of the longest in the country of any type like this. And then Greg Thorne, who was one of the previous winners, and he's rotating off. And he has contributed a lot, too, as a new person on the committee and been very helpful. So thank you to all of them. But special thanks go to all the examiners. Kent, I don't know, over 100 examiners over the last – this has been going on since 1996. It's almost for a lot of years. So thanks to all of them who reviewed the applications. This is all for no money. It's volunteerism. But I think the examiners have learned a tremendous amount, as well as the people who are being examined. And some of those went on site visits. The ones that are high-rank, could win the award, we went on site visits. And those are phenomenally interesting, fun, and extremely valuable. And it's required because that's the evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence. So if you have an interest, anyone in this room or virtually, please contact Julie Orting, who is a trooper. Julie's in the back. Stand up, Julie. She's a little bit shy. She's been phenomenal. I've been with her a long time. And she has really, really, really been helpful with us. So the purpose, really, coming back to the Corporate Achievement Award, is to champion improving worker health, safety, and environmental management. Communicate the highest standards of excellence to the business and professional community. Emphasize performance measures, positive outcomes, and continuous improvement, which makes this really kind of stand out. I think it does. Provide model organization with visibility and validation for the efforts. And recognize continuous efforts of improvement. And we know, we know, if you're not improving, you're falling behind. If you can't show you've got a way to improve, you won't improve. It's as simple as that. And so it's like Alice in Wonderland. If you don't run in place, if you're running, you can stay in place. So you stop running, you go behind. And I think that's what the Quality Improvement Program was all about from the beginning, when the United States got so far behind Japan and others in the world because they didn't focus on quality improvement. So in 1999, and this is where we – actually, this is an example of how the award process has itself had quality improvement. It's not we just tell you quality improvement. We have done it internally. And this is one example. In 1999, the Dow Jones came up with the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. You may have heard of it. It is built into – it has three dimensions, economic, social, and environmental. The Dow Jones Company ranks the 500 largest companies in the world on these three dimensions every year. Only the top 10% get listed as having a favorable sustainability index. It's an excellence award. It's the top of the tier. It's the group. Now, how is that important? Well, it's important because investors look at that. And nowadays, sustainability as a rule continues to be a key term, particularly after the COVID. How are you going to be sustainable in all these dimensions? We fit right into that, and so we changed the award to fit into these – not change the award. We reformatted it to show how this all relates. The highlights of the programs within those three standards – dimensions are our standards. Economic, organization and management, injury and illness management, absence and disability management. These are all things we all do. Integrated health and productivity management, health and safety information systems. That's the economic part. Environmental. That stands for – and these are all, again, our criteria for the award. Health evaluation of employees, workplace health hazard evaluations, education on worksite hazards, personal protective equipment, toxicological and assessment and planning, if it's applicable to your organization, external environment, and emergency preparedness. Emergency preparedness. It goes without saying now, but before COVID, yeah, we kind of got it. Well, see, that's why sustainability does make – and having your ducks in a row before makes a world of difference. Social. Quality improvement. Innovation. Innovation. We'll come back to that. Social and community responsibility. Health benefits management. Traverse health. Health promotion and wellness. Mental health and behavioral health and misuse of substances. Again, that last one. With COVID, that has tremendously increased, and I've seen it in my practice, too. I see patients all the time, every day, and that is a big issue. All right. So with that, I'll hand it over to you. Thanks, Dr. Yarborough. One of the things that you'll notice as we get to the comparison section of the presentation a little bit later, where we're actually going through a brief overview of some of the other awards that are out there, Dr. Yarborough briefly mentioned the 19 different standards that are included in the Excellence in Corporate Health Achievement Award. Each one of those standards is evaluated according to these four criteria, and I guess before I really launch in, I should include a disclaimer that despite my uniform and my current position with the United States Air Force, the content of this presentation is not intended to be an endorsement from the federal government, does not represent the official views of the government, Air Force, or Department of Defense. But as I was saying, with those four criteria, first, the individual standard, each one of those 19, is evaluated to see is there an exemplary program in place for that. That's important because you can look at one aspect of a company's occupational health and safety program. For example, maybe they have a very robust system in place to track, follow up on, return to work following a workplace injury. But do they also have an efficient and effective workplace hazard assessment for any kind of new processes that they're bringing on board? And are they going through those results to then implement the proper controls for potentially new chemical exposure? So companies can have strengths and weaknesses that need to be evaluated within the context of those 19 different standards. And second, the dissemination of that program across an organization. This may be even within a single facility or site, but also regionally. Are there multiple sites that, for example, on-site injury care needs to be available for, or across the nation, internationally? What's the difference in the accessibility of some of these programs within the organization to different workers, depending on the site that they work in? How effective is the buy-in into the program from top leadership down to the frontline worker? Something we're dealing with right now on my base is we have three shifts of workers that are all the time working on repairing some of these aircraft. How is our occupational medicine clinic meeting the needs of those workers at different shifts? And so we're exploring different flex shift arrangements for our own staff within the clinic to make sure that we're available and accessible to these workers when they need us. Number three is a foot stomp that you'll hear Dr. Yarbrough has already mentioned, evidence, data, objective metrics. It's something I'm going to foot stomp a few times throughout the presentation. This award is really focused on do you have metrics that can demonstrate the success, the effectiveness of your program? And that's important, not only for us as healthcare practitioners, we want to know and be sure that what we're doing is actually working and being to the benefit of the workers that we serve, but also in terms of leadership engagement, being able to show to your leadership, okay, here is what we're doing, here are the numbers, here are the metrics that you can objectively look at and demonstrate the value that occupational health and safety has to the organization. And that ties in nicely with number four, which is if you don't have data, you're not going to be able to show improvement over time. And there are a lot of organizations that may have a truly unique and it sounds great on paper type of program to address some of those standards Dr. Yarbrough had mentioned, but again, if you do not have the numbers to actually show the benefit of that program, will leadership continue to support it? Are resources going to be directed elsewhere? The data is something that we really focus on in the award and hopefully you do too in some of your programs. So to just give a brief overview of the application process, some of the finer logistics invited in via video. Dr. Kent Peterson, again, mentioned one of the fathers of this award truly, and you may recognize the other individual up there, too. I was lucky enough to interview Dr. Peterson as he explained some of this, so just a short video on some of the nuts and bolts of the application process. So could you briefly share some details regarding the criteria or the process to apply for the award, and any logistics that might come out on the other end for award winners? Well, the process of applying for the award is not that complicated. An applicant needs to complete an application and respond to 19 specific standards that comprise a healthy, safe workplace. And the key is, of course, not only to demonstrate programs and their dissemination, but especially to include outcomes and positive trends. So the timetable is that a letter of intent needs to be submitted to AECOM by May 15th. So that just lets us know who's in the pipeline, and then the application is due six weeks later on July the 1st. Then the applications are reviewed by teams of examiners, and if a company is able to move to the next level after the initial review, then a site visit is scheduled in the fall, in October or November. In the past, all of these have been on-site, in-person site visits, but of course, we've now learned that virtual activities are possible, and I believe that that may be a feature in the future. And then companies are notified of their selection and final status in December, which gives them time to prepare for presentation the following April or May. One of the real benefits is that every applicant, no matter how good or bad, receives a comprehensive written report from the examination committee that looked at their application, and that's a big benefit for the company. Oh, yeah, I can only imagine. Absolutely. I think any time we're receiving feedback, especially from those who have expertise in a particular area, is only beneficial. I appreciate you outlining that time. And you heard Dr. Peterson mention some of the benefits of participating. Obviously, everyone applies for an award, hopefully to win, but even if you do not win, there are a number of benefits. We have another short video from Dr. Peterson coming up that I think also outlines some of these benefits. But just to kind of whet your appetite, leadership involvement, I don't know how it is in many of your organizations, but sometimes it can be common for occupational health and safety to kind of be squirreled away in some quiet corner of the org chart without direct lines to some of the highest levels of leadership. And if you're going through the process of applying for this award, it does draw in leadership engagement, and it kind of puts everything at the forefront of maybe items that they had not been as intimately familiar with before the application process for this award. And especially for organizations of any size, you recognize the challenges of the silo effect where the different departments may not know what the other one is doing, may have duplicitous programs that you can do away with, or we thought this other agency within the organization was taking care of that. Maybe they're not. So bringing all those stakeholders to the table so that you can answer each one of those 19 standards just gets everyone talking, everyone on the same page. What is the status of our organization in these different areas, and who's responsible for what? Tracking program data results, we've already talked about that. I'll talk about it again. Sometimes when you actually sit down to apply for this award, you see, boy, you know, we have all these great programs, but we haven't been tracking anything. We haven't been collecting the data. We haven't done any benchmarking for where we were to show where we've gone to with the implementation of some of these programs. So sometimes it can just be a wake-up call to say, boy, we don't have as much data as maybe I thought we did. Similarly, being able to have that data and use it to show value justifies your occupational health and safety program within an organization, and hopefully even justify greater resources, which we all always seem to be strapped for. There are a number of excellence in corporate health achievement award resources that can be used to actually build your own framework for your organization. It's a really robust guide that's available on the website where you can go through item by item, and actually if a particular standard is something not in place in your program, there are some great pointers on how to get started and where to go from there. Dr. Yarbrough had already mentioned the site visits, and obviously that's a hands-on, boots-on-the-ground type evaluation of your program. We all know about JCO inspections and anything like that. It's a really good wake-up call for everyone to start doing what they should have been doing maybe, but it can be a really good motivating experience. Another short video from Dr. Peterson, again, emphasizing some of the value that can be found in applying for the award. From the timeline that you have laid out, it sounds like it's a very robust and thorough evaluation process. I think there is value in going through those steps even internally within the organization itself, looking at those 19 different standard areas that you mentioned. Your last point regarding the written feedback that each organization receives, I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit more and maybe talk about other valuable outcomes an organization can hope to acquire through participation in the Excellence in Corporate Health Achievement Award. I'd be happy to do that. Let me just say that there's great value in every applicant, whether they win an award or not, because of the process. Let me tick off a couple of ideas. First of all, even if an organization is not selected as a winner, they have a lot of intrinsic value. Part of that is that the whole organization needs to come together, bring together all the health-related groups, which often operate in silos, as we well know. This results in improved communication, understanding, and improved teamwork. Also senior management needs to get involved. They need to learn more about their company's health and safety and environmental protection program because they need to prepare and sign a letter that is part of the application. Then the company gets to benchmark itself, an objective benchmark, to standards of excellence. You get to find out really just how good you are in each of 19 different areas. You may be great in some areas, but as a result, you may realize there are certain areas where you really don't have a robust program. Then you get the objective and constructive feedback that I talked about, the written report, and that really is a help in improving programs. We've had several companies that did not get the award. They worked hard at their program. Years later, they reapplied, and they became winners. As a result, you may receive a prestigious award which honors your health professional team, it brings credit to the overall organization, and it also can be a morale booster to all the employees in an organization to know that their company cares about their health and safety and is actually being recognized for it. Now, these are great ideas, but a few years ago, the committee said, let us look for objective evidence. So, we published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine a study which documented that award-winning companies, companies that won the Corporate Health Achievement Award ranked higher in their category on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, so award-winning companies ranked higher in their economic and business success. Wow, and I think if you're trying to get buy-in from executive leadership on pursuing this award or why is this award important, you probably don't need to look much further than that last point you mentioned in terms of the actual economic success of companies that prioritize employee health. And that is a good point because when we talk about how are you going to demonstrate value, you need to understand what is value and what is valuable to your leadership, and that could be a different answer depending on who you ask, even depending on who you ask within the same organization. Your CEO may have a different answer than the Chief of Human Resources or the Chief Operations Officer, and I'm sure many of you have been involved in different projects where maybe the goalposts were moving on you a little bit even during the implementation. There are a few anecdotes I'll skip for the sake of time where we started a project with the understanding that there was one outcome needle we were trying to move, and by the end, we were focused on a different outcome entirely. So looking within your organization and your own leadership and finding the metric or the ultimate outcome that is most important within that context, you can find a way that the Excellence in Corporate Health Achievement Award will contribute to that. Dr. Peterson had mentioned some of these studies in his short video there, I think very well known and many past and present members of this committee who had contributed to that actually tracking the stock performance of the companies that had won this award previously and showing that these companies succeed. Again, in terms of value, that's kind of a common language I think among most leaders of organizations will be that financial bottom line that you can show. Okay, thank you for that. I forgot to mention when we started that I have no financial interest in this at all. So that's a disclosure. No financial, I never have. Also, I should mention, we're not talking about it today, but there's a strong governance structure to the Corporate Health Achievement Award. It says that examiners just can't be an examiner. You also have to have a conflict of interest statement and all that. So it's strong. Otherwise, it wouldn't be considered valid or reliable. So we do all that. It's mirrored after the Malcolm Baldrige Award in terms of governance. So what is new though? So that's what stays the same. The governance stays the same. But we've added on tiers, which means we've recognized that some organizations are not going to immediately be at gold level, which means they go through, do they have all the right programs in place? Are they deployed in appropriate locations everywhere? Do they have metrics or data at all in what they're doing? And also, are they improving, which is the gold standard, the trends, positive trends? So we've added a tier so we can help people educationally go along the route to become gold, which is what we try to get to. So we also expanded the eligibility because we know that many, many, many organizations, we call it the Corporate Health Achievement Award. It's really not corporate as in corporate company. It's corporate governance structure. There's an organization. There's a board, essentially, somebody watching out for the organization. So we included the nonprofits and the for-profits and gone down to 250 workers. We felt like that was a – we started at 1,000, then we went to 250. We found that that is feasible. You know, and that adds on a lot more organizations across the United States because they're mostly smaller. So what are some prior award winners? And if you look at the website, CHA.org, you'll see these listed out and some little information about each one of them, each of the years. We have manufacturing, Boeing and so on, health care, which surprises some people We have health care at one, including Baptist Health, HealthSouth Florida, twice actually, Erickson Living, which was Dr. Greg Thorne's organization, financial, information technology, government, including the Smithsonian, for instance, education, Vanderbilt, and pharmaceutical, and others. And also we had model and exemplary practices listed as well. So sometimes there may be just a – they may not win the award or be there, but one practice is really good, and I'll talk about that in a moment. So I'm going to move now to part of the – one of the objectives was to do a kind of a quick comparison with other safety and health awards because we wanted to find out how the Corporate Health Achievement Award fit in the whole scheme of awards and application type of – in the realm of health and safety. So it is unique, again, because we firmly based on the principles of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, have not strayed from that in all aspects. So that's a bit unusual, and I think that also means that it's – that was always built to be a proscriptive approach, not prescriptive. So the Corporate Health Achievement Award does not tell you how to do something. It tells you what you may want to be doing and how to measure that, but it does not say anything about how to do it. That's up to your organization, and that's just the same way as the Malcolm Baldrige Award, and that's worked out very well, and that's why it can go across all types of organizations. So here's one, the National Safety Council. Some of these you may have applied for yourselves in your organizations or you may have heard of, and one is the Robert W. Campbell Award. It really recognizes businesses that employ a management system. It's a systems compliance kind of approach, and it's reviewed by a panel of experts. There's written feedback, which is good, on each criteria they have, and there are in-person assessments, too, at two sites. The National Business Group on Health is another, and it's more focused on health promotion, and it recognizes companies for their innovation and comprehensive approaches to really health and well-being on a number of aspects you can see there. It's reviewed by peer health and well-being leaders at large employers and members of the Business Group on Health team. I was actually a judge for a couple of years for that program. And they receive a benchmarking report, which means it's different. It's like, okay, this is what everybody else is doing, this is what you're doing, and that kind of thing. So it's benchmarking on health and well-being. It's more of a well-being type. The C. Everett Cooper Award, I got involved with that way back when I was at Caterpillar, and we did a program there. And one of the goals initially to get kind of a bootstrap before we went was to get the Cooper Award. That was really big back then. How many people remember C. Everett Cooper? One, two, three, four. Anyway, Surgeon General. He was quite a character. But he did have a good award, and he really pushed well-being and health promotion. So they had an award, and I think it's now run out of Stanford. It's been in various locations. They recognize, again, health improvements, cost savings from health promotion. And the program's integrated, and they have results, and it's independently scored as well. HERO, which I was a member of that for some years, which is the Health Enhancement Research Organization, sort of a group of people interested in health promotion and health of workers. They have a web-based scorecard to help organizations learn about the best practices. And again, it's about promoting health and well-being. And they are scored, and they have six sections, and they're scored against certain criteria as I see here. And another award that many of you may be familiar with, the Wellco, Wellness Councils of America Well Workplace Award. They evaluate the organization based on the seven benchmarks of success. Just for time, we won't go through all those. But definitely, this award is similar to HERO in that there can be benchmarking and comparison of your information and your performance over time. Another interesting aspect is that this award will give you the top five strengths and top five weaknesses. That's something I think leadership always likes to see. Okay, we went through this, now what are we going to do? Or what are we doing well? Really has some potentially valuable information there. And many of your organizations may already be involved in the OSHA VPP. I know my base participates and really very focused on safety first and foremost, of course, and in terms of compliance with some of the OSHA standards. Obviously, some benefits for the organizations that do participate in terms of future investigations and so forth. But yeah, a valuable award or designation rather that really focuses on safety first and foremost. And then NIOSH Total Worker Health, maybe not as much a specific award, but definitely a philosophy and approach to occupational health and safety, trying to take a more holistic approach to this question of how are we not only keeping a worker from being injured or actively harmed, but can we use the workplace as a platform to promote health and to increase their well-being, maybe even in addition to what's happening outside of the workplace. Dr. Yarbrough? Yeah. Sorry. All right. Fine. So anyway, after reviewing all these, we did a study on it and found that really, if you look at a number of criteria, that the only... that the Corporeal Achievement Award is the only one they found to be comprehensive, provide expert review, and provide expert feedback. But I will say, you know, companies have won, like C. Everett Cooper Award, but I will say, you know, companies have won, like C. Everett Cooper Award also. So it's not... they don't preclude to others, actually. It's actually some of the information that you, you can win multiple awards by having a good program of data, and it applies in various, you know, to various awards. And there's nothing wrong with getting multiple awards and multiple feedback, that's even better. So, innovation examples, I mentioned we would talk about that briefly. How are we doing on time? 27, 27, okay, we're doing good, all right. So we'll go through this pretty quickly. So, we just picked out a few, we're preparing for this, just to give you some examples of real places. But the key was on, these are winners that had what we think would be some really interesting innovations. Quad Graphics is one of them, you may have heard of them. We were still around doing their healthcare system onsite. And they had healthcare cost trend, they found their healthcare cost trend was consistently below benchmarks. And they had the approach of controlling costs by a number of ways, and I won't, because of time, just say what those were. But the real key, I think, was integrating workers' compensation into primary care services. Which I think is an interesting aspect, not easy to do, and it's because there's different skill sets, almost. But it has to be done well. But their results were a year-on-year reduction in workers' compensation cost. This, I can ask anybody how they might say this term. And the name of the company, it's a construction company. And I remember it well, I said, the CEO said, Chin Bro. So, Chin Bro is the name of the company. Based out of the Northeast, mostly Maine, and they make bridges and stuff like this. So, they put together an accident prevention process under very sad circumstances. One of the, they have a Native American Indian who fell off a bridge and got killed. And the CEO said, this will never, ever, ever happen again. So, talk about leadership getting involved. They definitely were. He said they were on their private airplane, and they heard about this. Come back from a meeting, they said, we gotta have this never happen again. So, they pulled together this kind of, and they did the Corvallis Achievement Award as well. But this was a process that we thought was innovating, because it involved participation at all levels of employees. It really was an observation type of, unsafe practices, observations. And they did 24,000 of those of 30 minutes each after they trained everybody. And they also trained people in first aid and CPR, said every shift was covered. And so, they had six person years of observation and they had over 100 action plans. This is, I thought, felt very innovative and it actually was very effective. Name of Chrysler was a, had something called Bringing Excellence to Safety Teams Program. It empowered employees to become involved with the company, or why, because involvement is so crucial. Nothing works unless people buy into it. And they have to buy into it for their own reasons. It was really a model of cooperation between management and a trade union, which you may have heard of, UAW. So, it was a major trade union. And so, it helped to reduce this rate of injuries and lost workdays by more than 75%. And while saving millions of dollars in workers' comp costs. Okay. We're just about at the end. So, we'll definitely have some time for questions, I think, but did want to also have a little bit of interaction. So, even if we have the mobile mic, that would be helpful. Asking the audience here, in terms of your ideas, maybe things that have popped into your mind as we've been going through this presentation, or previous experiences that you've had in terms of engaging your leadership in something like this, where you bring this idea to your leadership within the organization of, this is something we'd like to promote, this is something we would like to pursue. What are some strategies that you think would be effective, or that you have found to be effective in terms of pursuing something like this? Come on, I know one of you want to talk. Jeff, you want to mention something? You had an idea. I didn't want to monopolize. No, go ahead. I'm Jeff Jacobs. I'm, for the past year, I've been the chair of an ACOM Presidential Task Force on clinic credentialing. So, we've certainly thought about the Corporate Health Achievement Award, because it really is a model of how to do something really well. But it's more an organizational thing. But what we're trying to do is something similar, but towards clinics. So, I see a lot of really nice suits. So, I have a feeling a lot of people are corporate people. And you may have an on-site clinic that you use, or you may farm things out through a TPA or something like that. And I know my pain points, when I'm sending people out to clinics, with the exception of examinetics, it is, am I allowed to say that? It's a shameless plug. It is the quality of the exams that I review. So, we're hoping to develop some kind of system. And what I'm hoping to do is just to have the membership aware of this. And if you're in that situation, and you'd like to talk to me about it, I only have one business card, so everybody's taking pictures of it. But give me a call, because I really would like to engage with you and your leadership. I think it's, one, a way to help clinics have a roadmap, much like you do in the Corporate Health Achievement Award, and how to achieve these things. But it's also an attempt to market occupational medicine providers and AECOM to the public, because we've been complaining about this for years. And this is, I think, a really good avenue of engaging with the employer community and the membership, and really getting the engagement that we don't typically have. So, that's my thought on it. And I don't want to crowd you out, because you guys. No, this is actually a thought you brought up with me just before the meeting. I thought that this was a, it's brilliant. What it does is it gets you involved with, it's a foothold. It's a way to get in front of the management, local managements, or corporate managements, and say, we need to do this for our clinics, and they can do this well, and they use the basis of quality improvement. That grows. The idea grows. It's got to start someplace, but it could be a nidus of getting into the organizations in some way and in front and say, look, we have clinics that operate to the highest quality standards and improvement, and we have data, and so on. All the things that we learn as being part of the Corporate Achievement Award, particularly, and how that can happen. So, you do it locally, and it grows at grassroots kind of approach. That's the way I kind of see it. It's just on top of my head. I don't know, Ken, if you had an idea about that, too? Other ways to get in front of management so that we can show value. Go right ahead. Dr. Peterson. I have a couple of comments. For many years, I was a corporate consultant, sort of like a Johnny Appleseed, traveling around the country, evaluating corporate-wide health, safety, and environment programs. I was often asked to evaluate a medical department, and sometimes to help merge medical departments of different companies. One of the things I learned was that the company medical departments were busy doing their work, but they very often did not know who their clients were. They knew who the boss was. It might be an administration, more likely an HR, but they really didn't know their clients. I encouraged every medical director to prepare an annual corporate health report, to report to the CEO on the health and safety of the workforce, and make suggestions of how it could be improved. The main thing was to get the medical departments to think about the leadership. So if I were talking to the CEO, to the C-suite people, I would ask them, what are your key challenges right now? And we all, I think, would agree that one of the biggest challenges is gonna be employee recruitment and employee retention. That was an issue 10 years ago, but in light of COVID, where there's this dramatic supply chain shortage of workers, I think this is going to be one of the most important issues to talk about with management. How do you recruit employees? How do you retain them? And that is by showing them that you care about their health, you care about their safety, you monitor their health on a periodic basis, you promote their health and well-being. And I know many of the companies that won the award had extremely good programs, not only in protecting health, but promoting health. So that would be the only thing. I would say the way to engage your leadership is, first of all, to talk with them, to ask them what their issues are, and then you can very quickly make the case for human capital as being just as important as industrial capital. Absolutely. Yeah, and that goes back to our discussion earlier about what is value to your organization and to your leadership? Is it lowered retention? Is it decreased workers' compensation costs? Whatever it is, use that as kind of your pressure point to demonstrate the value of what your department does and also the value of the Health Achievement Award. Yeah. Thank you very much. Those were such insightful presentations. My name's Vanessa. I'm an occupational medicine specialist from South Africa. So my question is, are these awards, the eligibility criteria, available to global companies that don't have an American footprint? The answer is yes, absolutely. I'm the, just parenthetically, the current national secretary for the International Commission on Occupational Health. And I was asked about two months ago to present on occupational health programs for Malaysia in Bangkok. It was being held for this group there. So I'm very honored to do that. But there was a real feeling for needing a framework, a comeback to this framework. And it's proscriptive, and it will work in any healthcare environment. And you select some of the pieces, some pieces like toxicology might not be right there, but usually it is. But all those standards, most of them, you select which ones will be the most applicable in your healthcare environment, so to speak, in whatever nation you're in. So the answer is yes, it's very applicable. And they asked me to actually follow up on that and try to come up with some ideas about more training about that. Yeah, thanks. We just have another slide or two, so just want to get everyone out of here on time for lunch. But really appreciate the thoughts and ideas. This is one definitely want to stress. Huge thank you to Ms. Julie for helping prepare the presentation and for all the work she does to coordinate. If you have any interest in either applying or to become an examiner who will actually review some of these applications, please reach out to Ms. Julie. We would definitely love to hear from you. And the more engagement, the better in this important process. And with that, we'll be happy to take any additional questions, but very much appreciate everyone's time and attendance. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Is there another one? Yeah, here's some references that just we talked about. So again, thank you very much. You know, it's been a labor of love for many of us, Kit and others. And so it continues to be. So we are really, really happy as this award goes into this next, I don't know, young adulthood, so to speak. Are we on time? Yeah, question. Going back a couple of slides. Prior to engaging with leadership, what I've found is it's really important to engage with other stakeholders first. So over the last couple of years, I've taken some grand ideas straight to the top. And the first questions I've gotten was, what does safety think? What does law think? I'm like, oh, I don't know. I got this idea. I'm like, well, you should probably go back and talk to your peers. So I'm gonna put it out there. That's a good point. Very, very vital to push anything across the goal line is to have everyone on board. All stakeholders engaged on the same page, united front coming forward. Agreed. Well, a lot of it is change management, right? I mean, when you wanna put in, and there's a whole school learning about change management. And part of it is finding your people who will enable and others who retract in an organization. And how do you convince the ones that are on the fence as well? So I think that's the key, but you need to find out who those people that your leadership is listening to, who will listen to them just as much as they listen to you, if not more, and to make sure they're all, at least the ones, there's no detractors. I think you can get by with people who are supporters and the ones sort of on the fence. Well, okay, it sounds like it may work. Or, but the detractors are the ones, and how do you win them over? Or at least not have them against you. And I think that's a piece that we, that's a great comment because that is reality, right? It's really politics in a way. So I think that's a great suggestion, figure out how do we do that. Thank you. Do you have any kind of foreign actors or big companies that, and I'm in a different, I'm kind of on both, so what he was talking about as well, so we have our internal workers' comp for HR and health, we're a healthcare system in the Southeast, so we could do something like this for HR and health and how we take care of our own teammates, but then my job is medical director over occupational medicine clinics, so we've got nurses and employers, multiple employer locations, so I see the other option being a good scenario. But do you have examples of how it benefited those employers to go through this from the benchmark from the beginning and then what happened afterwards that showed the benefit, maybe even financially? Because I know when I talk to our senior leaders, it's always, what is it going to do for us financially? And they're happy to see the process improvements, but in the end, it comes back to, is it gonna save us money or is it gonna cost us money? I just need to be able to just let that, you guys have access to that. Yeah, I can, Jim, I can think of like Baptist Hospital System, also Vanderbilt is another, where they take care of their own, there's two pieces of that, one is taking care of your own employee set, you know, your healthcare workers if you're in the healthcare industry, hospital. So, and now more and more, there's clinics going out, obviously, Inova is a good example down in, they haven't applied for a reward, but I know they're similar, there's a lot of these mega healthcare systems, I mean, they got 30,000 employees, and so it's huge, so you can show value, couple ways to show, but one is showing value to save money and improve health and retain workers and have more productivity, less substance abuse and all this kind of thing, less patient accidents, because they're thinking of something else, for your own work, so that impacts the organization itself, that's the bottom line. The other piece is, well, top line, and that is when you're going out and say, I wanna show that we have a set of, we're serving employee, employer companies, say, for instance, or help police departments, other clients, we're gonna start using our assets to get revenue, essentially, so what's gonna drive that? Somebody in another organization who might wanna pay you big bucks to run their operations, if you could show, it's almost like a stamp of approval, it's even better, because it shows that not only do we, we meet a minimum standard, we have an excellent program, we have an excellent program built in with quality improvement, and that's a good sell, that's a very good sell, and so that's a top-line answer, the CFO likes to hear, CFO, I'm sorry, CFO also likes to hear that you're saving us money. That's harder to, sometimes, to show, because it's, well, you're still spending money, and a lot of it seems soft, you know, the whole health and productivity thing, well, productivity, what does that mean, and how do we know, that kind of thing, so it's harder, actually, so I think if you're outfacing, you're going to look at, we're gonna start trying to get more customers, this is a good feature. I think QuadGraphs is a good example of that, they used it that way. Would you do it for, you know, I have multiple employers and we have nurses embedded, so would I do it for one employer, this award, or would I do it for my? You could do it for them, I mean, if they wanted to apply for the award, you would be appeased to run that for them. And they, so that's, yes, the answer is yes, you could actually do it for them, or they could do it internally, with your help, in some way, but it would be probably a collaboration, and it would look good to their employees, as well, just like Dr. Peterson was mentioning, you know, this is, it's been a real good sell. I know one of the, we talked about why managers will sign up for this, or CEO, top, whatever you want to call them, president of an organization, well, we're a health company, we want to make sure that we're providing health information.

Excellence in Corporate Health Achievement Award

benefits for organizations

application process

criteria for evaluation

data and metrics

effectiveness of health and safety programs

comparison with other awards

innovative examples from past winners

engaging stakeholders

tying award to key challenges