Radiculopathy, that’s when a T-Rex with sunglasses does a skateboard trick right? Nope.

Is that when you have an injury in your back? Getting warmer but not entirely true.

Well, what is it then?

This is why we’ve deemed it necessary to revisit this somewhat confusing, but nonetheless ‘rad’ term used in medicine.
Continue reading A Radical Revisitation of Radiculopathy

Picking up from last month, Dr. John Alchemy and Cory Oleson discuss a few of the more frustrating road blocks in workers’ compensation for PTPs, which end up making the whole claim more difficult than it has to be.

If you’re a workers’ compensation provider, adjuster, or case manager check out RateFast Express: the service that writes your impairment reports for you!

Dr. John Alchemy and Cory Oleson discuss the PTP (Primary Treating Physician)’s central role in a workers’ compensation claim, and the pitfalls of communication between stakeholders.

Continue reading RateFast Podcast: What Primary Treating Physicians actually do in Workers’ Compensation Pt. I

Work Comp physicians have a lot to take care of when they’re conducting an appointment with a patient. Once the appointment is over, the physician doesn’t simply hang up his stethoscope and go home. Oh no. There is much more work to be done.

Continue reading It Takes a Village (for a Workers’ Comp Claim)

It’s an exciting time at RateFast as we announce the rollout of the RateFast GigaRating, the most powerful tool in RateFast’s toolkit to date! Inspired by the work of Tesla, Inc. Dr. John Alchemy outlines the next great step on the work comp path to perfection.

If you’re a workers’ compensation provider, adjuster, or case manager check out RateFast Express: the service that writes your impairment reports for you!

 

RateFast GigaRating: Don’t Stop the Press!

Dr. John Alchemy: Oh and I was thinking um for a picture for it I can get a picture of inside the Tesla with a big screen we could have RateFast on it and get a picture of the Tesla steering wheel next to it.

Cory Oleson (Host): It sounds good we give you a worker’s compensation while you while you’re on the road. Yeah.

Welcome to the California Work comp report. It’s Thursday, October 28, 2021. This is your host Cory Oleson here with Dr. John Alchemy, discussing the RateFast GigaRating. How are you today, John?

Dr. John Alchemy: Hey, Cory, we’re back again doing well.

Cory: Yep, that we are and we’re talking today about the RateFast GigaRating and if that’s making your ears perk up because you haven’t heard about RateFast GigaRating before and you also have heard that word used somewhere recently Giga, Giga this, what is that? We are speaking about the RateFast GigaRating against the backdrop of the Tesla Giga Press model. And if you don’t know what that is, that’s great, because we’re going to explain what the GigaRating and the Tesla Giga Press model is for you today. So we’ll start off with the Giga Press the thing that we are sort of making an analogy to today. So John, what is the concept behind? The Giga Press? I mean, I know I’ll be telling you, I’ll be I’ll be saying along with you, but But how would you take? How would you take that away from from the start?

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, the Giga Press was something that Tesla’s been leveraging in production to to get a massive advantage, not only in quality and safety and engineering, benefits, but also in time, it’s, it’s a tool that they’ve designed, it’s a machine they’ve designed, that creates the skeleton of the cars that they’re building. And, you know, it was a very, very labor intensive process with multiple little parts that had to slowly be assembled into a bigger part before the car could start to be assembled onto the frame.

Cory: That’s the way it’s been for a long time, too.

Dr. John Alchemy: Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And we keep talking about Tesla, and I like to keep talking about it and watching it, because it’s so much about, you know, innovation and doing things that people never, invested in or thought to invest in. And getting out of the old ideas of this is the way that it’s done, and we’re just stuck with this really inefficient process. And we have to live with it. You know, and that’s what’s so exciting, I think about the Giga Press model in, in anyone doing business these days, you know, looking to, to a company like Tesla for inspiration and saying, We don’t have to do it that way anymore. And maybe we don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’re not doing it that way anymore. That’s what I really liked about, about the whole Tesla’s story and the energy around the company.

Cory: We were talking, I think we were talking, it was a few episodes, we’re talking about how people get very used to doing things in a very certain way. And especially when the technologies that have advanced are built upon doing things a certain way, but then there comes a certain point where one does or ought to look back at the original technology that everything is built upon and say, well, is this original technology, any good because if it’s not, then all that, you know, all this stuff that you’re building upon it to make that technology better is only as good as that original technology is going to be.

And I mean it is a good opportunity to reexamine the wig. An automobile is put together, something that was established at the beginning of the last century, and has just kind of gone a certain way. And we built all these robots to do it faster, and everything like that, but it’s the same sort of idea, you have a bunch of pieces coming together to make a car and everything like that, and it gave an opportunity to examine, you know, is the original idea, any good and so what was really cool that they did with the, the Giga Press is that they they scaled up the concept of, of making a die cast, Hot Wheels car, to the size of your car that you drive.

And that I think, if I read it correctly, that was sort of the inspiration behind the idea. It’s like they’re doing this for toys. And, you know, we’ve been able to do that for a long time. We’ve also scaled up things to you know, this size on a much larger scale. Why don’t do this with the things that we need to make 1000s of a day. Or intend to make 1000s of a day rather.

Dr. John Alchemy: Well, and I think you brought up a good point too. You know, the stuff that we’ve been doing for decades, it was probably the best at the time when it was invented. And I think that people just forget or become ingrained that there’s no other production methods or ways of thinking about creating things. And that I think is the take home here is that, you know, if we don’t think about it, we’re not going to improve it. And if we don’t improve it, we’re going to be stuck with the same level of quality, mistakes, errors, time and costs that we’ve always been been saddled with. And so you know, the big take on your stuff, stop doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome.

Cory: That’s it? Well, I’m not going to say this definitively in front of you, John, but I that’s what I’ve heard the definition of insanity is. But I’m not a medical doctor.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, well, I think it’s pretty close. I think it sure feels like that, because I think a different outcome doing the same thing.

Cory: So yeah, this is obviously a competitive advantage against the older model, which, again, the older model, the way of kind of meticulously piecing together a car from what it you know, several 100 pieces and doing things is, the bog standard, so if you’re the only one doing something in a new, and I guess, you know, largely more efficient, more intelligent way, then you have the competitive advantage in that case. So previously vehicles would be made up of three, or I think the body of the vehicle loan was made up of around 370 individual parts, and then you need 600 robotic actions, or, there are over 600 robotic actions that are needed to do this. And then in the original method, you have all this stuff going on, right? And, actually I’m going to step back and say, 600, robotic actions have been removed from the process of creating the frame of the body of a car via the GigaRatings.

So, before that, who knows how many there are, and also the, when you look at these gigantic machines, I mean, it doesn’t, it does, it almost doesn’t even hit you until you’re either like standing in front of one or see one at a good enough resolution video to see these gigantic machines moving incredibly fast with incredible precision. And you got to think like, oh, how much energy is being wasted by these gigantic machines just moving around all day, producing an amount of cars that has like a ceiling just due to just the bedrock technology that it’s built on?

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah. And the tremendous time savings, I mean, they’re talking about turning these things over in 80 to 90 seconds, this is what they quote and 40 to 45 pieces an hour. I mean, that’s unheard of.

Cory: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I need to see the numbers on how long it takes to, construct a car body the standard way, but I guarantee you that it’s not that much. Or it’s far, far more than that, so it’s just everything seems to be done in a more efficient manner. Especially because, you know, the assembly of 370 pieces itself requires all of this screwing and just twisting and everything like that. I don’t know if we describe this well enough at the beginning of the episode, but this is literally a die cast. It’s a mold in which the steel that makes up the car frame, is poured into, and then the cast releases and then you have the shape it’s the same as if you make like a casting, is a technology that’s as old as time and I mean, it’s talking about a time, your time proven technology and stuff. I mean, they do that with candles I know why would they do it with you know, everything like that.

So, yeah, so this is a new technology, replacing an inefficient technology that’s built using an older and definitely time tested technology, which which works rather well. Yeah, at least the eye that the hot wheel and the Yankee Candle Company would like to believe and I’m with them and believing that so, so yes, so we’re improving the quality. Because we you know, as far as I know, the more joints that you have to screw in and screw together and everything for a car, that just makes it more vulnerability is more likely, there are things to go wrong, I am not an engineer. So I do not know anything about this. But you know, I’m just speaking for what I think is common sense. And it improves the speed, as you said, yeah, 80 to 90 seconds for producing one of these car frames, and it lowers the production costs, because of all of these things.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, and in this day and age of supply chain problems, and all that stuff, think about the maintenance that goes into 600 robots, maintaining coding pieces that, break the maintenance, people that have to, fix these things, one breaks down, the whole machine is down, and all of these things that are really, really replaced in one fell swoop of, you know, let’s just make the piece all at once.

Cory: Yeah, absolutely. It makes you think, and since we’re talking analogies here to the workers comp, the whole the infrastructure of workers comp, it’s one of those things where I think, over time, as you were building these robots that put together the hundreds of pieces that made the older a, are they still existing car bodies, and the still existing robots that are still doing that, is, so much of that was probably a lot of people that came in and sold these car companies a nice shiny robot to keep the thing going instead of a, something that could fundamentally change what they were doing, and who knows if that was intentional or not, but you know, you do see people just just sort of, consequently, just moving forward in a thing that that doesn’t work. You know, coming up with all these ideas, when the resources, the mental and physical resources could be put into fixing the problem, which I think is a, if we’re talking a gestalt for the world today, I think that’s a kind of a way to look at it as well.

Dr. John Alchemy: Well, yeah, and I think transitioning as we begin to move this concept into RateFast and what we’re doing with this kind of concept, going from an action of many to an action of few or one, I mean, think about it, most people hopping in a Tesla and driving it, they really don’t care how the frame was built, they just, they want the car to work, they want to go from point A to point B, they want it to be a good experience, and they want it to be reliable. That’s really what it comes down to. I mean, how it’s made, and the technology and stuff is interesting, but the common person doesn’t really care about it. And I’m going to, and I say that because I want to tie it in people’s minds as we transition over to work comp ratings. It’s the exact same thing. Most people who review these ratings, insurance adjusters, attorneys, judges, you know, patients, QMEs, they don’t really have a good grasp about the detail, and all of the pieces that go into an impairment rating. And it’s not being disrespectful, but they just can’t, there’s yeah, there’s so many layers, that they have to be able to look at a rating and understand, where it came from, and the quality and the integrity of the source. And is it consistent? And can it be reproduced? And is it fair? That’s, that’s really their equivalent of the test drive of an impairment rating.

Cory: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, physicians shouldn’t feel bad. For when we say yeah, it’s pretty near impossible to collect all the ADLs of somebody, there’s something in me, like, you shouldn’t feel disappointed in that because it’s like, you know, you shouldn’t feel disappointed for not being able to dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, with just holding your breath. I mean, it’s just not feasible. It’s darn near not possible. I dare somebody to prove me wrong in the Mariana Trench thing.

Okay, so we see the problem. And as we know, RateFast is about solving that problem. And the problem is the inefficiency of work comp reports and the fact that you can’t do it in the way that it’s outlined in state law and everything with the resources that physicians are given it everything so what does the what does the GigaRating look like against the you know, apocalyptic backdrop of have, you know that the climate change of work comp? You know, which, in many ways, I mean, one could, in many ways, looking at the field writ large, I think one could almost make that argument. But yeah, I mean, what so how does it How does the GigaRating look in this sort of context?

Dr. John Alchemy: If once upon a time before, you know, the GigaRating was even a concept or was reality a person who is trying to do a rating would have to sit down, they would, if they gather the data themselves, you’d hope you’d have a decent data integrity collection, you know that most of the questions were asked, there’s probably, you know, well over 300 or 400 pieces of input data, for instance, on a cervical spine rating. And if you look at the average QME report, or primary treating physician report, you’re probably going to see more in the neighborhood of, you know, maybe 30, 35.

And then when you look inside the report, and the way that it has to be constructed and rated, you realize that there are several processes kind of like that, that frame moving down the production line, you have to figure out the pain in the ADLs, you have to score that, you have to look at your measurements, you got to check them for consistency, reproducibility, you got to go to tables, you know, and there’s all these different steps. And if, if you look at one of our GigaRating tools, the cervical spine, for instance, there’s 50,000 calculations in that tool. And that’s, that’s the GigaRating happening at one time. And if we step back and say, wow, what would it take a person with extreme deep knowledge in this area, I’m talking to an expert that knows everything cold sitting down, and doing this manually.

Think about that, you’re sitting down, but you have to do it manually – 50,000 calculations and checking tables and accuracy, you know, and let’s say that you’re good at math, maybe you even have a calculator, where all the tables are in the book. So it’s not like you’re hunting around for them, let’s say you have them all taped up on the wall, you know, it’s going to take you at best probably 90 seconds to do each calculation, look it up, verify it, multiply it by, the value to make sure that it’s in the 10% variance, for instance, and all that stuff. And and if you do the math on that, it comes out, and it’s pretty amazing that that person would have to work without sleep for 1.7 months to do that kind of detail.

Cory: As soon as you said calculations, I was out. And then. And then you said 50,000!

Dr. John Alchemy: And then I also want to say, this is not checking your work. This is just going through at one time.

Cory: Yeah, it’s at that point that you run your work through a computer to check your work, you know? And at that point, why don’t you just have the computer do the thing in the first place anyway?

Dr. John Alchemy: Exactly. But again, it’s one of these things that no one has really had the resources, the time, the interest, or the expertise to sit down and create the GigaRating, all we have are, some services that people can use cottage industry, a couple of feeble calculators that have been out there that are very generalized, or don’t consider everything. And the trouble is, is that people don’t really have insight into the low quality of those ratings. They just say, oh, here’s a rating, here’s a car, I’m going to get in it. The wheels haven’t fallen off as far as I know, and that kind of thing. But there’s a lot of work that passes as impairment ratings that probably shouldn’t be accepted as valid results. But the problem is, we’ve talked about this before, insight, opacity in the system, how it’s done, and a lack of the of the customer, being a stakeholder not being able to check the work. That’s a real problem when you’re handed a number, but you have no way to check the value.

Cory: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s very interesting, because I feel like probably one of the things that has kept people from automating or computerizing a system, like workers comp or something like that, there might be a lot of stigma that because I’m just thinking about how my mind is just going back through my life and the way that technology has been viewed throughout my experience. You have like y2k and stuff like that there used to actually be a lot of skepticism around computers and actually like, storing documents on them is they were seen as unreliable. And these were all things that were before, what we would come to know is the cloud. And as well, it’s just the implementation of computers and technology in every other aspect of life, except workers compensation. And other ones.

I mean, there’s there’s plenty of things where we say like, oh, yeah, no, a human could do this job better. You know, things like that. And I think it’s, it’s time to reexamine that, that that very thought process. I mean, some of these, the things that are holding a lot of people back are just these sort of automatic thought processes, that we ourselves are just computing these these programs that are running in our mind that says, oh, we can’t do that. Because something I thought, something I’ve thought and haven’t reevaluated, 20 years ago, you know? And I think that the technology that we’re talking about, you know, updating fundamentally, the things that we’re going back to the very roots of and changing. And I think the thought process associated with with integrating technology into work comp is another one of those things that needs to kind of go back, be reevaluated and reconstructed. Which is probably why I think that’s a big reason why these things haven’t been adopted as a standard.

Dr. John Alchemy: Well and the other thing is putting together a GigaRating tool requires an incredible amount of resources, you have to organize people, you have to have people with the right skill set, it has to be checked, it has to be rechecked. Go through a series of quality assurance, work all the bugs out, run case after case, check it manually again, then go back in, tune it up, and it is a big job. And that’s why no one’s done it. Who is going to sit around and do this?

Cory: I was going to say, yeah, that is that sounds like torture, who would be crazy enough to go and do and make it available for other people to use? And it has been hard work. We’ve been discussing in the works, we may or may not have a future episode, where we discuss sort the milestones of RateFast as a company, and where it’s come to be, what it is today, including what RateFast used to look like and how it used to be. It was just as effective and efficient as it is today, it was just more steps for us on our side here. And we had to kind of fine tune everything to make sure that everything that we were implementing as technologies to make RateFast, better, faster and more productive and everything. We’re also effective at working within themselves, we didn’t want to build something that that was automated, that actually was was running a bad program and stuff. So it’s taken a while, but the model car that we built, and especially with our new GigaRating technology, it’s more efficient than ever, and there’s just always room for improvement. And yes, or rather always room for innovation. In our thing, and, once again, like we’ve talked about before, hopefully but by the time somebody else, oh, I’m gonna get started on a technology that makes workers called better it’s gonna be like, well, how about you check us out and see if see where we’re at and see what we’re doing at this point, too.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah and RateFast, I think has always kind of focused on what I believe is the most important thing, which is his timely, accurate and fair settlement. Because getting out of a work comp, case is it’s like being stuck in a tar pit, you can ask any patient that’s tried to had have, an injury of any significant magnitude get resolution. It’s just the most frustrating thing that you can imagine, it’s being stuck in a time warp where nothing happens and everything stays the same every single day, in the claim drags on and no one can seem to figure out the settlement and they’re fighting over it, and all the information in front of us yet the stakeholders just refuse to to To claim that, hey, we have an accurate settlement rating, and that’s what we set out to change. It’s like, let’s stop guessing about the value of this, we know what it is, yeah. How about we just get this claim settled, and, get this worker on their way? That’s really the most satisfying thing, I think, for doing all this work, is when a patient tells me yes, the claim got settled in, it got settled on the RateFast number, and I’m happy and I’m done. Those are the best days of going to work.

Cory: And something I have to say about that, generally speaking, when you do the same thing on a day to day basis, and when that thing that you do on a day to day basis is also, rife with, either both a rejection, or objection to, by a company that that can’t accept your work. And also, when things do go through, you’re not really sure why that all of these things together, it just makes life in general, kind of suck it just in general, you’re like, why am I doing this? You know why you’re doing it, but it’s just, it’s demoralizing, I guess you can say, and I can’t speak to that from a being a work comp physician, because I’m not, but you know, I can speak to that from other angles in my life that you know, that you get caught in the cycle. And you kind of think that that’s the way it is, and then all of a sudden, something comes out and says, oh, no, it’s, it can’t be better. I don’t, you know, like, you just need to kind of step out of that and see what’s out there for you. And that’s what we try to provide. I mean, it’s like, imagine that thing that you know, grinds on you or whatever, imagine that’s just not there anymore, and it’s that easy.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, and do something else with your time.

Unknown Speaker: My goodness, there’s a, there’s a huge world out there, I was just looking, I get I get in my downtime, in these like, little kind of minimal minutes between doing things that was just, I was just looking today at pictures of the rain forest and in the basin in Congo, and just the flora and fauna out there. And it’s just amazing to think to stop for a second and just, you know, put on the brakes of all the crazy things and sort of remember that, wow, there’s this vast expanse of just like, just the planet that that, it’s just kind of exists outside of this, wouldn’t it be nice to go and visit that in some free time? And I think that anybody could say that it’s like, now you can have even, especially if you work in workers comp, and you us RateFast, then you can have more free time.

So that’s always for consideration, just throwing that out there. So yeah, we’re certainly not as a company, invisible by any means. But we’re also we also need to be seen by the entire industry, we just need to I mean, it’s either that or things are gonna go the same way forever and ever. And that is not our intention, either. So that’s not going to happen. So when we talk about the industry, and the industry, looking at what we do, and sort of accepting a certain model of things, why would the industry and why will the industry embrace the RateFast GigaRating model for work comp?

Dr. John Alchemy: It’s an interesting question. And, when I started RateFast, I thought, hey, people are going to want a better way forward, they’re going to be interested in it, they’re going to be enthusiastic about it. And as many things are, once you get into it, and actually put a product out and see how it plays, you get often a different response than you think you would. And the first feedback we were getting, not from our customers, but from, insurance companies that weren’t familiar with RateFast attorneys, the disability evaluation unit, they’re never quite sure how to respond to a process that they’re not familiar with. And yeah, in the in the easier responses. I don’t understand this, so it must not be right. You know, that’s just sort of the human response. And we had a lot of that. You know, I don’t understand how you’re doing this. I don’t know, you know, what a what a variance means? I haven’t heard this before. I’m just not sure what to make of it.

Cory: And then they turn around and say by the way, the work comp system sucks.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah. Everyone’s unhappy and complaining about it. That’s right.

Cory: Yeah, I wish something would come fix this, by the way, I don’t recognize this. So it looks nothing like this that I recognize this entirely broken system.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah. But it’s interesting, because when we have a client, and they’re using the RateFast impairment rating service, it’s always the same thing. For the first three to four months, the adjusters who are working consistently with that client will send letters and how did this happen? I don’t get this, this has never been rated before. Why are you rating it now? You know, it’s always the same question. So there’s a flurry of letters, sometimes from the disability evaluation unit, but mostly just from the insurance adjusters. And in its without fail there’s usually about, I don’t know, probably one out of every six ratings gets a letter, and that lasts for about three months, and then they totally go away. And the reason they go away is that when we response, and we welcome these letters of inquiry, because we always look at it as an educational opportunity. We start educating these people.

Cory: We have their full attention to tell him exactly how RateFast works.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah. And they can focus and apply it to their work. And without fail, they’ll always ask about one to two questions deep. And the RateFast answers go more like 15 to 50 answers deep. So we can take them as deep as they like to go or they’re willing to go, but the bottom line is most people are satisfied after one or two questions of inquiry.

Cory: They’re like, Oh, wow. All right. There’s a lot of stuff to it, like, you guys really did your work.

Dr. John Alchemy: I mean, I don’t know what the standard is people not doing their homework, that that’s been the standard. And that’s why people are skeptical. And they said, well, you can’t get a number like 27. You know, you just can’t do that. Yeah, it’s like, yeah, we can, and we can do it over and over again, if it’s really supposed to be 27.

Cory: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. We’ll take it another doctor’s information on this rating and assume, assuming that the patient gave them the same answers that they need, and everything, it will be a 27% rating. So I mean, that’s what we’ve done is we’ve we’ve created a method to translate, the, what was it? Oh, my goodness, I’m forgetting our episode titles. Oh, no, it was the one it was the one. You know, we’ve we’ve created essentially the Rosetta Stone to communicate sort of the industry specific language between the different stakeholders. So yeah we’ve done a lot. That’s, the 50th thing for you to know about. When you’re reading, when you ask us how it works. We will just link half of this stuff, we’ll just link them to the podcast,

Dr. John Alchemy: But getting back to the answer. The answer is it’s been glacial. And it’s been mostly silent. And it’s been individual, we haven’t had a big breakthrough yet where the state wants to step forward and say we need to standardize this process where we’re wasting a lot of people’s time. And we need to use a process like RateFast to come up with settlements, if we’re really serious about saying we want injured workers and their employers to have fast, accurate, claim management settlement. That’s really the big piece that we’re looking for, is is the administrative piece, the regulatory people to step up and say, yeah, the process really needs to be more efficient. And until then, it’s going to be everyone else getting the benefit, but it’s not going to be truly adopted, until the regulators come in and say, Yeah, we need a platform, like RateFast that is comprehensive, detailed, and a Giga Press for everyone to benefit from and hopefully that’ll happen someday. I’m really hoping.

Cory: Yeah, well, I think that one of the biggest things that will probably help them do that is if these people look left and right, everywhere they look it says RateFast, RateFast, RateFast. So everybody’s using all these things, all these stakeholders are using RateFast and I think in order for the stakeholders to use repasts then they should, you know, they should be aware of the benefit fits of the read fast and the RateFast GigaRating. So how will the GigaRating benefit the stakeholders, John?

Dr. John Alchemy: Well, I think we just touched on it, it’s going to give rapid access to large scaleable amounts of data to the injured workers and the people that need to settle these claims and pay out the claims. And, I understand that there’s a lot of middle people in workers comp, you have all kinds of, you know, vendors and people doing steps and, trying to simplify things or take, things off other people’s plates and do them. But the bottom line is, let’s just stamp this value out at one time, and know that it’s a better system than trying to have 270 people assemble and impairment rating and hope that it sticks together on the road. I think, the take home from today. Yeah, is that if you if you value those things, simplicity, accuracy, efficiency, RateFast is going to be your tool, if you want to limp along businesses, usual: painful, slow inaccuracy, multiple opinions all of them wrong. And don’t use us. Keep doing what you’re doing.

Cory: Yeah, if you like that!

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah. Maybe some people do? I don’t know. But I’m not one of them.

Cory: Some people are, if you’re a glutton for punishment, then that is your thing. And the status quo is very much around and therefore you. And so we would like to invite and say to anybody who is interested in what we’re doing, and how you can do it too, how you can join us and be a part of it and watch it all, as your, as your as your impairment ratings and your work comp reports, you know, in general, are created efficiently and in a way that we believe should be implemented not only statewide, but you know, everywhere.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah.

Cory: Come on down to RateFast at ratefastexpress.com. And learn how we can help you and I will give a couple of URLs that are plugs at the end of the episode too. So John, do you have any closing words about the GigaRating? And how it can help workers comp?

Dr. John Alchemy: Well, I’ll just say use the GigaRating, get the right rating and go out and explore the world with your free time. How about you do something else other than work comp?

Cory: Yes. You’ve got the Congo. You’ve got Patagonia. Yeah. You’ve got you know, you can go to the North Pole, I’m sure. I think yeah. Yeah, get it while you can. So we’re also hoping that in turn, we’re inspiring others to turn around that which is affecting our planet so that you can continue to go to your favorite vacation spots with all the time that you have that you’re using, RateFast GigaRating, boom.

Dr. John Alchemy: Okay Cory. Thank you.

Cory: Thank you, John. We’ll see you next time.

Dr. John Alchemy: All right, take care.

Cory: To find out more about the RateFast GigaRating visit our blog at blog.rate-fast.com and give requests GigaRating a spin at rate-fast.com.

New technologies are applied to old, outdated systems. People attached to the old, bad technologies will point out how the new technology bares no resemblance to what they’re used to. It makes you wonder why that is. We spoke to Dr. John Alchemy about a few analogies pertaining to those clinging to something that flat out doesn’t work.

For more information on this episode, and other helpful tips about workers’ compensation, visit the RateFast Blog.

If you’re a workers’ compensation provider, adjuster, or case manager check out RateFast Express: the service that writes your impairment reports for you!

 

The RateFast Self-Driving Impairment Report

Cory Oleson (Host): Welcome to the California Work Comp report. Today’s Tuesday, September 28 2021. This is your host, Corey Olsen. Back at it again with Dr. John Alchemy to discuss the self driving impairment report. You’re not going to want to miss this one, folks. So here we go.

Welcome back. How are you doing today, John?

Dr. John Alchemy: Doing great, Cory. It’s good to be back here and talking about more impairment.

Cory: Yeah, it feels good. Especially because it seems like we have have at least a bit of an audience because between last episode now we are celebrating over 4500 listens and downloads and streams to our podcast. So it feels good.

Dr. John Alchemy: It’s awesome. Awesome.

Cory: If you’re a listener, and you listen to us regularly, and you’re coming in again, and everything like that, we really want to thank you for doing this for listening to us and hearing all that we have to say because we were in it for a good cause. And we believe that just getting the information about doing workers compensation, we’ll combat all of the bad workers compensation that’s out there. And it’s not all bad. But it should be all good. For everybody.

Dr. John Alchemy: Well, and we have to start somewhere. So we’re starting here.

Cory: Yeah, the journey of 1000 miles, begins with 4500 podcasts, please. So today, our topic is the self driving impairment rating. And this is one of those ones, John, where I consider myself an audience member a bit because I’m very interested to hear what you have to say about it. So we have, in this climate we have the talk of and the horizon of self driving cars. And in many respects, we do have self driving cars, it’s just there’s all these kind of categories as to when when something is fully right, or, things like that. It’s an evergreen topic in the in the in the social. What’s that journey of Zeitgeist is? Yeah, I’m curious to know about the self driving impairment rating.

Dr. John Alchemy: Take it away, take it away. Yeah. Well it’s a good analogy to talk about what’s happened in the driving in the automotive industry compared to know what’s happening in the impairment industry. And I thought that today we could talk about the parallels. And the similarities between automotive of which there are so many transitions taking place now. And impairment rating, obviously, the Automotive Department is a little bit larger about market segment than impairment rating, but I think the analogies are valid nonetheless.

Cory: Without even accounting for the proportions of the size of the automotive industry, I think that it’s just as confusing as workers compensation.

Dr. John Alchemy: I think it can be so and fortunately, I have access to a Tesla car. And so a lot of the analogies I’m drawing I’m not just talking about I’ve actually experienced personally. Yeah, and also the impairment rating, of course, I’ve experienced personally and I’ve had opportunity to see how it’s impacting the different segments of impairment rating and, and how people’s acceptance of it is coming along, how it’s, how it’s changing behaviors, and changing what people used to do and what they’re starting to do now. About five years ago, the automotive industry really changed with Tesla and the electric car industry. And it for the most part kind of went unnoticed. A lot of people, including myself, so self entrenched in fossil fuel cars, and the whole infrastructure of gasoline that we grew up with, and taking the car in for oil changes and buying parts for your car, and all of these things, and this do it yourself. I think Cory probably our parents used to change their own oil in the driveway.

Cory: I’ve been known have been known to do it.

Dr. John Alchemy: You’ve been known to do it? Well, you stay tuned to this podcast. That’s right. I’ve got a few things to say to you.

Cory: Yeah, alright,

Dr. John Alchemy: The point being is that cars went from something very simple and something very kind of kind of taken for granted to something very different. Now, I don’t think probably any of our listeners could do a repair on their own car as they sit now in anyone’s driveway, just because of the computer and the technology, regardless if the cars electric or gas, and as users, we become less and less able to affect or change, or participate in the actual maintenance of our cars, and the cars have just become something that we use. And because of that it has to be simple, and it has to be no-brainer, or it’s just not going to make it in the marketplace. And that’s kind of the old concept, I think, behind any type of technology or innovation that’s looking to disrupt an entrenched market, like cars. Tesla did some really interesting things all at once. And this is even just leaving out their whole play on, sustainable power power storage. As they’re, I think they filed in Texas to become an energy supplier people.

Cory: Texas of all people!

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah. Yeah. and I mean, look at the problems with the power grid, when they froze last year.

Cory: A couple inches of snow and the whole thing fell apart.

Dr. John Alchemy: Talk about disruption. But it’s interesting, when you look at one company, all of the technologies, markets, it’s changing. And so just a couple basically going from the crisis of greenhouse gas and global warming, to electric versus fossil fuel probably the most obvious. And I listed in my notes, just no-brainer, right? Getting off the fossil fuel. I was listening to it to a podcast from Elon Musk. And he said if you really think about it, our dependence and use of fossil fuel is probably the most stupid experiment in the history of mankind. Because we know we’re using a finite source as our energy we know, it’s damaging our planet, our living environment. And still, we’re doing it and what’s up with that, and it’s true, you you can only kick the can down the road, so many, so many generations.

Cory: Yeah, it’s such a, kind of a microcosmic picture of just a lot of philosophies that just kind of need to change, you just kind of hang on to momentum until a lot of these, it’s sort of like multi generational, like, it’s, uh, I’ll just hang on to this momentum and hope that me, nor my son has to deal with his baby. Right, him and his son will have to deal with it.

Dr. John Alchemy: Hopefully I don’t have to deal with that conversation.

Cory: That’s right.

Dr. John Alchemy: So anyway, there’s that obvious the other thing Elon Musk has talked about multiple times is that he was not going to be successful at converting the market to electricity unless he had a super compelling product that was I think the word he used hands down better than any fossil fuel car ever made faster, more efficient, more options just a better experience all of these things, it just it just had to win and not just win, but when big in all of these categories safety all of these things that an electric car had to prove to everyone driving a fossil fuel car to get them to pay attention and say, well, maybe this is a change and not just as an environmental thing, but as a quality of life and just a better car that had to happen.

In the whole approach to cars, not something that you sell to someone to get from point A to point B but, a computer on wheels, that is continuously monitoring data using that data for multiple dimensions, be it driving patterns, safety, finding the fastest route the software that goes into that the pioneering of updating the software in your car, in your garage at night through your home WiFi as opposed to bring going into a dealer and having them operate an operating system. And here’s really where we see a lot of the dependence going away from the user as far as the technical understanding and needing to know the workings of their vehicle to more of what I’m here to use this car, and it has to be simple. And it’s got to work for me and more of a model that’s plug and play. And some people want to know how their cars work, and that’s fine, but most of us probably don’t.

Cory: Yeah, the operative word for that being like layers of abstraction as an armchair programmer, abstracting layers, which is done in programming, like when you do that, when you run into, you call like a higher level programming language and stuff, like a lot of those things are done, just to kind of streamline the process for you, the user to kind of get it will get to your destination quicker, and things like that. So in that respect I mean, that levels of abstraction are good when, you don’t want to be driving one of those jalopies while also taking the traffic and the weather and the condensation for the area and updating the firmware on your model T and stuff like that. It’s nice to have technology to do that for you, you know?

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah. And, impairment ratings are very similar, we’re taking away a lot of the technical understanding and requirements for users, be them, doctors, claims adjusters, attorneys, judges, anyone who needs to have an accurate impairment rating, rather than here’s an impairment rating, you can have confidence in, it’s consistent, it’s accurate. Here’s your impairment rating. Yeah, we can give you the details, if you have a question, but here it is, stop worrying about it, we’ve been worrying about it since impairment ratings came into existence, that someone in the back room with a pen and paper sat down and did this, and there’s probably an error, and you’re probably right. But as we go forward with digital impairment rating, and the slicing and dicing of customized impairment ratings based on the individual, a lot of these concerns are going away, and we’ll talk about that a little bit more an example.

And then obviously, the better quality of life back to the car. And back to the car analogy, being dependent on volatile pricing of fuel, out here gas, for 55 bucks a gallon and being dependent on these wild swings. And, and how about just, you don’t have to go to the gas station anymore. You know? That’s huge.

Cory: Yeah, especially, it’s it’s wintertime, you don’t want to get out of your car. Do all that. Yeah, yeah, it’s all those things. It’s not winter time yet, but when it is, you don’t want to get out.

Dr. John Alchemy: Well in it all adds up, it’s not only the cost, but the inconvenience, once a year, I don’t know how much or a week how much you drive, but the gas station, 1520 minutes filling up, and you do that 52 times, a year and that’s stuff you could be doing with your life elsewhere.

Cory: It’s true. I would I shudder to think about the person that, St. Peter handing me the kind of the analytics of my life afterwards showing the files. Yeah, at the gas station, or, in my younger days on the side of the freeway waiting for somebody to bring me a thing of gas, things like that. Right. Think first car things, but yeah, definitely. Yeah. And especially when you have a when you have a system, that just just like a what, like a well put together workers compensation system that does sort of a similar thing, as we’ve talked about that RateFast does, is collects collects data on our good, our reports that have been accepted and everything like that. So not only is it doing the physician a favor of saving all that time and effort and such that would just be spent kind of stressing out over how to do a worker’s comp report, but also the data that’s collected helps every other doctor that’s using RateFast to get through their impairment reports quicker and better as well.

Dr. John Alchemy: So yeah, you don’t have to keep looking over your shoulder and saying, Gee, I wonder if this report is right or did you know someone, put the decimal in the wrong space, or did they forget all that stuff, it just, it just becomes much less of a concern and you can focus more on okay, let’s get the next page go and let’s do the next exam. Let’s get the next impairment report started, and it’s really a whole different quality of life for the providers. Absolutely.

And then this last part, which is the whole podcast is about is self driving. And that’s something obviously, Tesla’s been in the news a lot about is their Driver Assist or auto steer feature or autopilot, however you want to call it, but eventually, it will go to the point where cars will do self driving on surface streets and understand complex situations. And the only question is, what system is going to be triumphant in getting to that point the fastest. And that there are different ways of looking at it. But Tesla’s view is A) going to total visual system cameras only, no radar, and none of that, for reasons of conflicting information cost hardware costs delivery to the end user at an efficient price, and then this new concept of the neural net, that many years ago, this concept of the neural net was, machine learning and being able to put layered systems of logic and understanding and almost a self realization of a program to learn more, the more data that it’s given.

And it was interesting, because I was listening to a comparison between Whammo, that have has these cars out driving the streets with all these spinning whirly gigs, and things that it’s measuring the environment, and they maybe, let’s say they maybe have 600 cars out there, and you’re looking at Tesla collecting it now from a growing fleet of a million in some cars and going up by 30, 40,000 cars per quarter. And that is, that is their data collection system, you kind of think about, it’s like, Gee, I wonder who’s gonna win that one?

Cory: Yeah, it’s completely incidental to the, just the making electric cars, if suddenly you think that you can rely on kind of like, when Uber first came out and everything, it’s like people said, well, I have a car, I can put that to work.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah. So these these big transitions, these big disruptions, there’s some books written around this concept and the kind of the standard, the books that I’m familiar with, call it the zero to one divide. And that means going from nothing to something significant, like a major change a major step, a major disruption, and that is to be compared against something, as opposed to an iteration. So you have Uber come down the pipe, for example. Or you have Tesla come down the pipe, and then you have people that also want to get into the space, and they’re not really there to disrupt it, they’re there to take advantage of the new market segment, and tweak it a little bit so it’s like one to 1.1, or one to 1.2, or we’re making those little buttons that pop off the back of your phone that you can hold it in green and yellow, as opposed to black, stuff like that.

Cory: Yeah. It’s, kind of outside of the utility at that point.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah. Right. But as that as an industry when when something happens like that, you’re either on the front end or the back end of the tidal wave of the change that’s coming. And as, as a person and a company you really need to make the decision, if you’re up for the journey, or not sure, you can wait and get a cheaper, more polished, product five years from now. But, but you’re not going to have the opportunity to leverage the disruption in a way that can be beneficial to what you’re trying to do for the industry, as someone who comes along late and I think, as a phone analogy, most of us can say that not many of us are using the phones on the wall anymore in the house. It’s just kind of sits there.

Cory: There’s no phone that has a cord in my house that isn’t intended for charging it.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, yeah. In my phone on the wall, really, in case there’s an emergency and I can’t find my cell phone. I mean, that’s the only reason I continue to have a landline. That’s it.

Cory: Yeah, and I mean, what you were saying about being sort of kind of attaching yourself onto something that has already crossed the zero to one, divide the on off the IO divide. As a person who plays music, just thinking about historically, bands and everything, a lot of times you’ll hear about like, oh, this this band was the first metal band ever, something like that. And then right, you find out oh, no, that was built on a foundation of, of all these other things that are happening. And I think a lot of people not not that they’re thinking about the first metal band when they’re making their startup company or something like that.

But I think a lot of people are sort of afraid to do something that is that is so radically new, because it’s a risk, there is a risk involved with it. So what it requires in order to successfully pull it off is an original vision, I think that it’s invaluable, and it’s, it’s necessary, but I think a lot of people, it’s almost like the time and effort that’s required to get to the point where you’re having that original vision, it’s like, oh, I could just make the thing with the green and orange buttons on it instead. So yeah, that is why it’s important to see what divides need to be crossed, especially if it’s relevant to something that will help people.

Dr. John Alchemy: So yeah, and you really have to be ready to do a pivot. And getting back to the Tesla analogy, Elon Musk, in his interview with saying, look, when Tesla started, they just wanted to build electric motors for other car companies. And lo and behold, no one would buy them why because they wanted to make gas cars. And then they thought they would drop it, in a lotus, and, just put a battery in lotus. And now they have, they don’t have to manufacture a car, and they can just put in a battery and electric motor, well, they found out that they basically had to rebuild, 90% of the car to make it electric friendly. And that’s when the light went on and said, we’re building cars from the ground up. And that was really the beginning of Tesla’s we understand it. Yeah, absolutely.

Cory: Yeah. When I was living on on the coast, I used to drive by the Tesla factory all the time. And it was kind of when they were coming up, it was before I knew much about it. So it was just like, oh, what is that? what is that huge place?

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, and back when I got one of my first Tesla’s in 2017, I remember the delivery center, you walked in there, it looked like an Apple store. And there was someone that would greet you, and they would put the app on your phone. And then you would go sit down and have an espresso from the Tesla embossed espresso machine. And then they would take you out and walk you through your car, and make sure that you knew about it and off you would go and to me, that’s when it really clicked on me that hey, this is the new model of software transportation, essentially. And if you haven’t bought your stock, yesterday, you better buy it today because, this is really going to take off and it’s very clear, like when the first smartphones came out, it was it was a wildfire when it switched over. And I think we’re seeing that in electric cars now too. With with a production constrained Tesla, they just cannot. I mean, there’s a chip shortage, but aside from that, they have a difficult time keeping up with demand.

Cory: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully that is bringing up lay interest in programming as an embedded programmer. I hope that that it’s funny, you get into something, you find a hobby that you really like doing and then suddenly there’s a worldwide shortage on that thing that you just, have to have.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, you have to have to have it.

Cory: But we have here, something that something that you’ve called A Tale of Two ratings, and I’m intrigued about this, John.

Dr. John Alchemy: Well, if this is something commonly that we’re seeing at the timeline for RateFast right now, and I’m seeing it, I’ve seen it more and more and now I’m actually starting to see it less and less but but the example I wanted to bring up was actually an insurance adjuster company that purchased the RateFast directly, there was a doctor that didn’t want to do it, and they couldn’t get access, QME. And I won’t go into my feelings about QMEs and doctors impairment ratings in general. But anyway, so they purchased the report directly from RateFast, RateFast wrote the report for them. And then the insurance adjuster felt for some reason compelled or I think, I think systematically required to obtain a second party review service of the report that they had purchased from RateFast. And, I won’t go into the details about, what triggers in an impairment report to be reviewed by a second service.

Cory: We have plenty of material on that already.

Dr. John Alchemy: But anyway, so the second review service basically lifted up the hood on the Tesla car and saw a Fronk or just an open space in there. And they’re like, where’s the motor, and if I can’t see a motor, this car can’t drive. And if it can’t drive, it must be broken, and therefore the rating must be zero. And that’s exactly how they reviewed the report. And they even went as far as to say, this RateFast rating value is arbitrary. And it they simply, they just had no explanation as to how the rating, was done to such, detail on the amount of information that was in the report they were reading.

Cory: Essentially, what I’m imagining in my mind is that you traveled, it’s almost as if you traveled back in time and then handed somebody a cell phone and told them it was a telephone, they’re like, this is not a telephone.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, it’s very similar to that. And what we’re dealing with is an adjuster who wants to be on the leading edge, definitely wants to do the right thing wants to get an accurate impairment rating. So they have, they have one foot in, I want to be innovative, I want to get this done, I want to do the right thing. And then the other foot has kind of stuck back in this, oh, I better hire some, cottage industry impairment rater, to make sure that this is okay, because I still need that blanket to hold on to in order to feel good about the rating, because I don’t know how to check impairment ratings. I’ve hired a service with a great reputation. But yet, I think I better have my, gasoline mechanic, take a look at the electric car here. And give it that. The 20 point maintenance check in, there’s no oil dipstick. Now what do you do?

Cory: And so yeah, so we have kind of two, I wouldn’t even necessarily say competing, because it’s not, to this point, it’s sort of a, just just two things that are introduced to each other. So to two philosophies here. And so we have one that is sort of, I mean, pretty much at this point, your only real knowledge of it is that it’s just another philosophy, and their only real knowledge of it is, I don’t know what I’m looking at, therefore, it must be wrong.

Dr. John Alchemy: It has to be wrong. Yeah. What well, it is in their context in their world, it can’t be correct, because, it wasn’t written old school, and that they don’t have the tools to understand what they’re looking at. So the easiest thing to say is, yeah, the money you paid me to look at this as correct, and I’m telling you, it’s just a wrong report. So, therefore, your money was wasted, which I will argue with a little bit later. Yeah, probably was wasted.

So but the issue is, RateFast, and digital impairment rating as it continues to grow and become more of a flywheel, the more information we get, the more data we get, the more things we’re able to infiltrate with, digital determinations and algorithms and stuff, is that we’re only getting better and more granular at what we’re doing. And it’s simply just another example of software eating up an industry. It’s not that the invention of the electric car is is is all that, earth shattering, it’s the way that the software is being overlaid on the car. That’s the real innovation that’s happening.

Cory: It’s the way that the individual components kind of dovetail into other kind of aspects of life. Kind of irrelevant or tangentially related topics and industries and stuff.

Dr. John Alchemy: Right. So the adjusters to be commended on, wanting to, to invest in the new technology, and that’s exactly what they did when they purchased the report and the report’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s understanding it and getting your head around, wow, the things I’ve worried about in the past, I don’t have to worry about now. And I can either use that time to do more work more efficient, more meaningful work, or I can, give it over to an old mechanic that doesn’t know what they’re looking at and pay them money to do something that really is not going to affect the outcome or the validity of the report in any way. You know.

So we have these Luddites. Yeah and it’s, I don’t want to use his negative term, but these people who hang on to manual calculations and narrow understandings, those things are kind of gone, we’re not worrying about the things that they worried about, because there’s so many metrics that are now used in a report to determine a rating, that you can’t go at it from one angle and say, yeah, I’m going to, get a get the correct impairment rating by using one approach when we’re now using five, let’s say, to arrive and adjust for values. So I think we’re finding a lot of these people stuck on the zero side of the divide, and there. And it’s been interesting, because doctors are really the first ones who want to do the crossing, they traditionally don’t like impairment reports, it sucks up a lot of time. It’s not good revenue. It’s just a loser in every direction for a doctor.

Cory: So I mean, you’ve explained this, so I’m not asking you directly, but I have, asked you this directly. It’s like, how do you get into an industry where, that it’s just bad, it’s just made in a way that it just, things are just don’t work? And I mean, for you, John, you had a vision of making it better. But, yeah, for the people that don’t want to adjust to that, it’s sort of like, what, you’re just a masochist at that point. Because you clearly got into it, knowing that into work on knowing that it was like an inefficient system and everything, and then when presented with something that could be a better option. If you don’t want it, then you are hurting yourself, or you’re wasting your time or something.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, I mean, I guess there’s a lot of ways we could, we could talk about that. But the one thing that, that I think we’re coming across is that I’m seeing a lot less resistance from stakeholders on RateFast reports than I ever have. And I’m seeing things in reports saying, send this case to rate fast for rating, that’s just part of their treatment plan. And, hopefully, it’s becoming a brand that people have faith in, they know, it’s an unbiased, standardized report that’s getting better and better. And it’s something that they can invest their reputation in, as well by knowing it’s the good faith and credit of RateFast. And that’s really ideally what we want, we want value in our reputation and our product, above all things. And if we don’t have that we really, we really don’t have anything to bring to the market.

Cory: The good news being that we do have some very enthusiastic customers of ours, so yeah, yeah. So we’ve got that part covered, that’s good.

Dr. John Alchemy: Well, and they’re doing well, and they’re spending their time on things to grow their business and their market share, as opposed to arguing with adjusters and attorneys and the DEU about, ratings that were manually done, and getting caught in that they can be freed from that, which is really nice. And we’re, I think we’re just at a point now where, and this has happened to me personally, a couple of times that, the first time you hear about Google or Facebook or Uber, like it’s already happened, it’s like, when did this happen? And then suddenly, everyone’s using it. But, the company was started, like, six years ago, where was it? And how did it come out of the blue? It didn’t it just, it was just such a useful concept and so disruptive that, it had to prevail. And I was back on the zero side of it, and just learning about it.

Cory: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes you think you’re on the one side, then you have yet to make the leap and things like that.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, and RateFasts the exact same way. I think that eventually the markets going to wake up and say, yeah, what were we thinking? And wow, this did happen a long time ago. And we either discounted it or didn’t know about it or didn’t understand it. But of course, everyone uses it now. And there’s a lot a lot less angst about impairment rating, hopefully. And we move on and innovate something else.

Cory: Yeah, that needs to be done. When they discover that we will be at the at the subatomic granularity level, we will have, in the way that we’re talking about sort of incidental innovation coming from, like, a larger idea or something, we will have discovered the meaning of life by that time.

Dr. John Alchemy: The meaning of impairment ratings. Yeah. Right. But it’s going to come down to those that will follow us into the space and the message is simple, if you want to correct and you want it accurate, come with us. But, if you don’t, we’re not your company. And I’ve always wanted to keep it very clear, and very simple that, if you if these are your values, correctness and accuracy, and getting a fair rating the first time, buy from us, buy our car, charge with us, whatever, but if you’re but if that’s not your game, and you’re looking for, a rating that you’ve predetermined, and you need someone to massage or somehow find that result, we’re not your company. If you’re a glutton for punishment, we are not your company.

So anyway, I wanted to wrap up just with kind of the things that we’re using to disrupt impairment ratings, and then we’ll close it up. It’s been a long podcast, but I think a lot of the generalities we’ve raised are valid, and maybe someone out there who’s has some influence in the industry or really wants to scale their business of work comp, or their footprint, is going to hear the podcast and say, yeah, that’s us, and we want to invest in those values. And become part of that RateFast DNA in the business, we do whatever aspect of work comp they’re in. So, but anyway, getting back to the arbitrary comment of the of the cottage industry impairment rater, who was looking under the hood and found themselves staring into the abyss, actually, of computer chips, and in motherboards and so forth.

Cory: It sure like looks like the Abyss when it’s your first time looking at it.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yes, it sure does. But just to kind of walk people around again, what we do is that, when we look at impairment ratings, we do not look at it a narrow set of data. In the report, we’re looking at a report, that’s run in parallel, and three different dimensions that we document and we review. And the first one that we do is something that basically, I’ve never heard anyone talk about, and that’s the data integrity, what’s the quality of the data here? How much of it is, is here? And how much is missing? I’ve never, ever seen an impairment report and impairment reviewer talk about data integrity, they say, oh, yeah, these measurements were wrong, or they’re incomplete.

But there’s never any number on it, and you never have any idea if it was a little data missing or a lot, or if it was good quality, or if it was, junk data, which we’ll see lots of times in reports. And it, yes, and then we do the standard WPI, based on the objective findings, or lack thereof. So yeah, we create the WPI, and figure that out for you. But then the last thing is that functional loss rating, and that’s really the big elephant in the room that controls all AMA Guides, ratings, is how much function has this individual lost, and it’s not always accurately reflected in the objective findings, doctor didn’t do everything they were supposed, or the dog cut off part of their data set? I don’t know.

Cory: What that’s what the we hear that from doctors all the time, we were inclined to believe them, you know?

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, the patient ate my data set. The other thing that we do that’s unique to us as we’ve started to classify reports, based on natural language terms, and that’s really a big deal in the industry. What does it mean when someone says that there’s some loss, there’s minor loss, there’s significant loss, those things just, have never really been documented or standardized or defined and RateFast is doing this in conjunction with all the data that comes in and of course with with the rules, and in demonstrations outlined in the AMA guides. So, it makes it powerful to be able to take a report a standard report that’s written in terms, that reports are actually written in and generate some type of impairment report from that, instead of running it through the med legal system and, getting 10 different results. And everyone claiming they’re right.

So anyway and then we take all that data, and this is really another big advantage, once you have mastered the data and have obtained it and digitized it, you can use that for other aspects of the report. And another elephant that sits in the room is impairment is apportionment. So apportionment is the stuff that’s non industrial that’s contributing to the permanent disability that’s going to be recognized in the in the settlement. And these are things like preexisting injuries, obesity, degenerative changes, arthritis, etc, etc. And I’m just saying if you like the old school, where the doctor writes down, it’s 80%, industrial and 20%, non industrial, and that’s my medical opinion, which in parentheses means that’s my guess. Yeah, you’re really, really not going to like our reports. Yeah. If that’s what you’re wanting. And we stopped guessing 10 years ago, we stopped this, but people have been guessing ever since. And they continue to guess. And it’s just like, what champ? Do you really want to get your business in? Do you want it on something that’s justified and defined? Or do you want to guess, like it’s been done in the past?

Cory: The year, the year is 2070. And us? You still have a gas car? Yeah, you’re finding you’re finding it harder and harder to find a gas station, let alone rolling reserves on the planet?

Dr. John Alchemy: So anyway at the end of the day here, I want to revisit the comment that they made on the RateFast report, the reviewing service. And just the suggestion of arbitrary, and the report is everything but arbitrary. Again, if you understand that the engine is not under the hood with an oil dipstick, but the engine is in the data and the algorithms that help that data talk to each other to make something of it.

Cory: Absolutely. And then if the thing is also, if we show you the work, if somebody says, hey, I saw this, I didn’t understand what was under the hood, I want to see the work, what you will see is what you should have done, which is the work that the entire time, we just made it more efficient. So there’s no, there’s nothing, it’s abstracted insofar as we have the, probably the quickest and most efficient method of doing it the best. But again, like, if you deconstruct that it’s the same thing that you should have been doing the entire time. Just made quicker. So yeah, and that’s kind of why it’s always fun when people challenge when people challenge it, because it’s like, oh, you want yeah, go ahead. Like this is what we used, and we hand them the AMA Guides, fifth edition.

Dr. John Alchemy: Well, in and it’s an opportunity to educate, we’re not here to, at least I’m not here to have, gotcha moments with people out, but I’m just really here to say, look, it doesn’t make any sense doing this, please join us in going forward, if you’re really committed to something that’s more accurate and correct. And getting this case settled, let’s did we forget about that along the way that this case has to be settled at some point. And this worker needs to move on with their life. That’s really what it’s all about at the end of the day.

Cory: Yeah. Workers compensation, right, but you’re trying to compensate worker fairly.

Dr. John Alchemy: Right. Yeah, and the other thing too, that came out of this this tale of two ratings was that the insurance adjuster probably spent the amount of money they spent on having this this review done on the rate fast report probably could have purchased them another four or five impairment reports from RateFast and closed that many more claims. Yeah, use that money towards something that actually moves the needle forward. As opposed to introducing, guessing and confusion into your report.

Cory: Once again, it’s one of those like those dovetail, dovetailing outwards things is you save a lot of money when you save a lot of time.

Dr. John Alchemy: And in closing, Cory, I’m just going to say I was at the science museum in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, and I saw this shirt on someone walking around there. And it basically said it had like, the NASA insignia on it, and it said the world is not flat, we checked. And it’s kind of the same way with impairment ratings. These impairment ratings are correct. And yeah, we did check.

Cory: Yeah, absolutely. And we continue to check. So, yes, we’ve got satellites in space, we could show you the pictures. So yeah, well, so what we’ve learned here today is that there is an event horizon of sorts for which, on the other side is his vast unknown treasures of things that will just make life easier and better, especially when you’re kind of trying to, similar to the Tesla situation, when you’re in a scenario where you’re not only trying to do something better, but you’re trying to kind of clean up what’s been kind of made a mess of already. And it’s very scary for a lot of people to kind of cross that barrier. And it’s even if you, crossing that barrier doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re like, following somebody or doing something, but it just means that the doors open for you to go and, and partake in this sort of new thing. And that’s what RateFast is done. And we encourage people to come with us and take the easier route than to hang on to a jalopy that’s leaking oil and everything like that.

Dr. John Alchemy: Yeah, and just in closing, I’ll say, and I just want to be clear, everything that comes out of Elon Musk’s tweet account, or his mouth, I don’t 100% agree with.

Cory: You don’t want to have a coup in Bolivia?

Dr. John Alchemy: But they asked him in one interview, really, why are you doing all this? What’s SpaceX and the boring company and Tesla, and giant batteries, saving the world and all that stuff. And really, why are you doing this? And he said, and something that resonated with me was that, I just don’t want to think about the future and be sad.

Cory: Yes. Yeah. And I think that sometimes it takes something that simple, to be an incredible motivator.

Dr. John Alchemy: And I don’t want to think about impairment ratings and be sad. No, because I’ve been sad for a very long time thinking about them.

Cory: And there are many things to be said about with an impairment rating, because there again, there’ is a person on the other side of that, so it’s very easy to be sad about thinking somebody’s not getting out.

Dr. John Alchemy: So, Cory, maybe in closing, when we post this blog for this podcast, you could put the link on there to finding the nearest Tesla Supercharger for.

Cory: Alright, John, well, thank you so much. And we will talk to you next time.

Dr. John Alchemy: We will. Thanks again Cory. See ya.

Cory: If you want to learn more about RateFast, the self driving impairment report, visit our blog at blog.rate-fast.com and take RateFast out for a little test drive at our website, www.rate-fast.com.