Three years on: we’re changing but there’s more to do

By John Nagle, CEO and Managing Director

1 September 2015, icare is established. 31 October 2015, icare establishes Workers Care. 10 May 2016, icare appoints a Chief Medical Officer. 12 October 2016, icare expands mobile lung screen service to small and medium employers. 21 November 2016, the icare Foundation is established. 2 December 2016, icare and Sargood Foundation open $22 million Sargood on Collaroy. 30 April 2017, employers can now buy/renew policies directly with icare. 8 September 2017, icare launches HBCF Builder Self-service portal. 31 December 2017, icare transitions from five scheme agents to three. 1 January 2018, icare launches a new claims service model. 7 June 2018, icare contributes $15 million to the NSW Mentally Healthy Workplaces Strategy. 1 September 2018, icare celebrates its 3rd birthday.

This year marks the third birthday of icare. We are proud to have served New South Wales over the past three years, protecting, insuring and caring for the people, businesses and assets that make our community great.

A quick bit of history: icare (Insurance and Care) NSW is the home of the NSW Government’s insurance and care schemes. It was created three years ago to consolidate the State’s insurance and care schemes and deliver better outcomes for NSW.

In 2015, NSW businesses were facing a confusing set of options for workers insurance premiums depending on which Scheme Agent they were allocated. Injured workers were experiencing a claims process that was adversarial and difficult to navigate. We took it as our duty to review and improve this by better understanding our customer’s needs and placing the customer at the heart of everything we do. We also wanted to improve the customer experience for our participants in our care schemes, making the application process easier and getting them the right support faster.

This led to an ambitious transformation from a conservative, legislative-centric government agency into an innovative and person-centric organisation, with the goal to be a sustainable world-class social insurer and to change the way people think about insurance and care.

Three years in, we have started to realise our vision and deliver improvements for our customers. We’ve kept employer premiums steady for three years straight. We’ve opened our doors to our customers who can now contact us directly, 24/7, in a way that suits them. We’ve cut red tape across our schemes and severely injured workers and road users now have control over the type and level of treatment and care they receive. We’ve also upped our offering for builders and government agencies, providing more information and services than ever before. We are on track to deliver more than $200 million per annum in operational and provider savings.

As we’ve undergone this transformation, we’ve used a Net Promotor Score (NPS) program to gauge how well we are meeting the needs of our customers. Our NPS scores are telling us every day where we are making a difference and where we still have more work to do.

We reduced the time to make decision about dust diseases from 136.7 days in 2015 to 42 days in 2018. There has been no increase to premiums for 3 years, equating to 1.4% of wages. We have increased from $99.2 million provided for lifetime care support to $192 million in 2018. We reduced the time to make medical support panel decisions from 6 weeks in 2015 to 5 days in 2018. We have direct arrangements with providers delivering $50 million per year in savings.