Question 1

What data does workforce health risk analytics bring together?

Accepted Answer

Health and safety data, occupational health data and employee benefits data are usually held on separate platforms, frequently owned by the provider of each service. Analytics consolidates those sources, together with absence, employee assistance, income protection and private healthcare data, so that risk can be reviewed as a complete picture across the demographic data.

Question 2

Why is health and safety data on its own insufficient?

Accepted Answer

Health and safety data are incomplete when held apart from occupational health and benefits data, so risk is not really evaluated. This is especially relevant with mental health, where the same population appears in absence records, occupational health caseloads, income protection claims and employee assistance usage, each on a different system.

Question 3

Do we have to move all our services to a single supplier?

Accepted Answer

No. Not every organisation wants a single supplier, and there are legitimate reasons for using several providers, sometimes for the same purpose. It is now possible to use multiple suppliers and still understand your organisation's health risks, see what is working, and maximise cost effectiveness.

Question 4

What are the five steps to a risk assessment?

Accepted Answer

Identify the occupational hazards. Decide who can be harmed and how. Evaluate the risks and decide on precautions or controls. Record your findings. Review your assessment and update it. These steps are governed in the United Kingdom by the Health and Safety Executive, under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and associated regulations.

Question 5

How long does an implementation take?

Accepted Answer

The timescale for setting up the data input depends on a number of factors: how much data you hold internally and how quickly it can be transferred, which depends on your own data protection policies and on notifying employees of the type of data and the reason ORIGIN will have access to it, where individuals can be identified; the quality of that data; how much data sits with suppliers, how many suppliers there are, and how willing they are to share it; data may be analysed over different periods, so if you can send sickness absence data and private healthcare data without individual details, we can analyse those first and advise on what would enrich them; and once we have the data, analysis is fairly quick, but it includes a human overview to check the integrity of any AI or analytical outputs and potentially to undertake further analysis before a report is produced.

Question 6

What contributes to physical risk at work?

Accepted Answer

Psychosocial factors such as attitudes, beliefs, fears, emotions, pain behaviour and coping strategies, together with personal risk factors including age, gender and ethnicity, levels of activity and purposeful exercise, strength and conditioning, excess weight, sub optimal nutrition, poor sleep, alcohol and drug use, financial problems and relationship stressors at work, at home and socially. Most ergonomic risk assessments consider the work but do not really consider the person.

Question 7

How does functional movement screening assess physical risk?

Accepted Answer

The Functional Movement Screen assesses fitness to work before, on or during employment. It includes physical and psychosocial assessment, uses AI to assess the risk associated with the person, and provides recommendations on what interventions need to be considered.

Question 8

What obstacles keep people off work after a musculoskeletal injury?

Accepted Answer

The psychosocial factors recognised as clinical flags. Yellow covers attitudes, beliefs, fears, emotions, pain behaviour and coping strategies. Blue covers work related factors of the kind set out in the Management Standards. Black covers manual work with no opportunity to modify, conflict with insurance such as Group Income Protection, over solicitous family, friends and healthcare staff, legislation restricting the options for a return to work, and a financial incentive to remain ill.

Question 9

Why is mental health reported as increasing across employer data?

Accepted Answer

Mental health is commonly ranked as the main reason for days lost in sickness absence, is often the highest number of cases managed by a single condition in occupational health, and is often the highest number of group income protection claims. Employee assistance programmes are provided solely for mental health, so the same picture appears repeatedly across separate systems.

Question 10

Why do private healthcare plans show low mental health claims?

Accepted Answer

Claim levels on private healthcare plans are normally low, often because the benefit available is limited, and because most conditions presenting are not significant mental health problems of the kind those plans are designed to cover.

Question 11

What are yellow, blue and black flags?

Accepted Answer

They describe obstacles to returning to work. A person with negative attitudes and beliefs about their condition carries a yellow flag, negative perceptions of their work a blue flag, and a likely financial benefit from remaining absent a black flag. People are more likely to remain off work where these are not identified, assessed and addressed, and they are rarely considered.

Question 12

How is presenteeism measured?

Accepted Answer

Through the tool in development, which records self-reported productivity impact from employee self-assessment and manager observations, physical factors, psychosocial factors, occupational factors mapped to the HSE Management Standards, obstacle flags within the psychosocial flags framework, and work and environment. ORIGIN also offers support services to improve the quality of an organisation's data on both absence and presenteeism.

Question 13

What proportion of productivity loss is invisible?

Accepted Answer

Most work on presenteeism and lost productivity has been associated with mental health, or has relied on predictive analytics without a robust dataset actually captured by employers. If absence data are limited, as national statistics and privately sponsored reports show, then the uncertainty around productivity loss must be greater still. The logical answer is that the majority of productivity loss is invisible, because employers and healthcare professionals are not assessing the broader determinants of health and how they affect a person's work and quality of life. One of ORIGIN's core aims is to help employers understand and assess that delta.

Question 14

How can an employer tell whether its benefits are working?

Accepted Answer

By correlating benefit provision against outcomes. The questions worth asking are direct ones, such as whether private medical insurance is reducing absence, and whether the employee assistance programme is reducing the incidence of mental health problems in the workplace. Those answers require data from several suppliers to be analysed together.

Question 15

Why are employers unable to answer that question today?

Accepted Answer

Because the data sit with the providers of each service rather than with the employer, on platforms that do not talk to each other. Without the missing data the risk cannot be properly evaluated, so benefit decisions are made without knowing whether existing provision addresses the risks the workforce carries.

Question 16

What does an employer gain from consolidating the data?

Accepted Answer

The ability to provide the most appropriate benefits, to assess whether those benefits are delivering as expected, to understand occupational risks against personal risks, and to evolve the support provided so that it meets the actual needs of the workforce rather than a standard package.

Question 17

What return on investment should an employer expect?

Accepted Answer

With data so fragmented, risks not fully understood and costs often not fully recorded, calculating a return on investment is fraught with limitations. Providers often publish returns on investment, but they also have limited access to the data. Consolidating the data is what makes it possible to identify whether existing strategies are delivering the required outcomes and what the benefits are delivering.

Question 18

Does ORIGIN compete with insurers, brokers or providers?

Accepted Answer

No. ORIGIN is not a provider of clinical services and does not place benefits, so it does not compete for an intermediary's commission and does not displace what they already sell. The analysis sits behind their service rather than alongside it.

Question 19

Can an intermediary offer ORIGIN analysis under its own client relationship?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The analysis is designed to sit behind an existing service, so an insurer, broker, third-party administrator, occupational health provider or wellbeing platform can use it to support the reporting and advice they already give their clients.

Question 20

Does an employer have to change suppliers to use ORIGIN?

Accepted Answer

No. ORIGIN consolidates data across whichever suppliers an employer already uses. It has no interest in which providers hold the contracts or which benefits are placed, which is what allows the assessment to be independent.

Question 21

Who owns the data and the analysis?

Accepted Answer

The employer remains the controller of its own workforce data. ORIGIN processes it to produce the analysis, and reporting is provided at a level that does not identify individuals. The confidentiality model is set out in the participant privacy notice.

Question 22

Can occupational health providers use the assessments in their own services?

Accepted Answer

The assessment methods, including Functional Movement Screen, Job Task Analysis, Fitness to Return to Work and Psychological Risk Assessment, are structured so that a provider can apply them within its own delivery and return consistent data for analysis.

Question 23

What would a first engagement involve?

Accepted Answer

We would suggest an initial meeting to discuss what ORIGIN can provide, after which a proposal can be made. If of interest, the first level of engagement would normally be consultancy, although an engagement may begin with one of the assessment tools to aid discussion and identify gaps. ORIGIN believes no one size fits all, and that includes the policies and procedures around engagement. We aim to be nimble and flexible to meet the needs of each client.

Frequently asked questions

Workforce Health Risk Analytics

Physical Risks and Productivity

Mental Health and Presenteeism

Benefits ROI and Employer Cost

Who we work with