Tis The Season To Be Jolly!

Every year we are lucky to have extra jolly employees to spread the holiday cheer at a nearby

Pinnacol carolers ready to sing!

assisted living facility. Our group of Pinnacol carolers entertained the residents at Village at Lowry last week with traditional holiday songs such as "Jingle Bells", "Let it Snow", and "Deck the Halls". The event has been held many years now through our employee run volunteer program called Pinnacol in Action and has become a Pinnacol tradition that many employees look forward to each year. The residents were thrilled to have the seasonal visitors back and participated in the fun by singing along. Their gratitude was felt at the end of the event when many of the residents warmly thanked each singer. On a cold dreary day the warmth and holiday spirit could certainly be felt by both our carolers and the residents. 

Business Intelligence Analyst position now available!

Our Business Intelligence team is gearing up for 2016 and one of the things they are wishing for in the new year is to welcome another Business Intelligence Analyst to their group! This specialized position will create and maintain business intelligence tools and assist and advise the Pinnacol Business Community regarding development and maintenance of decision support programs using ad-hoc query tools in an Oracle/UNIX environment.

The ideal candidate for this role will be a great communicator with the technical expertise to support projects that require heavy analysis and problem solving. This position works both independently and as part of a team to design and construct BI solutions and will be expected to effectively communicate findings to management and help devise business intelligence strategies.

Candidates for the Business Intelligence Analyst should have expertise with reporting tools (Brio, Hyperion, Microstrategy, or the like), expert level problem-solving ability and 3-5 years experience with databases. A Bachelor’s Degree is strongly preferred although relevant work experience may be substituted for the degree. Project management skills and insurance experience are a plus.

If finding yourself in this kind of position in 2016 is on your wish list we'd love to hear from you! We ask that candidates please apply via our company website.

Happy holidays and best wishes for 2016!

From all of us - Terry, Debbie, David, and Megan (seated) -
Best wishes for this Holiday season and the new year!

For the Pinnacol recruiting team it's been a very busy year. Given that it's almost mid-December its nice to look back and take pause. We'd like to extend a very special Thank You! to everyone who considered Pinnacol as a potential place of employment in 2015. We reviewed thousands of your resumes from all over the country (and some from outside the U.S.) and had the chance to meet with hundreds of you in person either through interviews or at various job fair events. We know it takes effort on your part to complete applications, attend job fairs, and send in your resumes, and for those who came in for formal interviews we know how stressful that can be. So again, thank you!

Many people celebrate this special time of year. Whatever the cause for your celebration, all of us on the recruiting team - Terry, Debbie, Megan, and David - wish you a happy holiday season and a safe and prosperous 2016!

Two teams at Pinnacol you may not be familiar with...

Candidates who visit with us are often surprised about the number of career options we offer. That's in part because our corporate headquarters are here in Denver. For many of our competitors the only presence they have in Denver or Colorado is a small regional office which means to truly grow their careers their employees may have to relocate out of state.

One of the teams we have at Pinnacol is called Provider Network Management. Unless you have insurance or healthcare experience you are likely not familiar with this career option. The Provider Network Management team manages Pinnacol’s provider network, SelectNet, the largest network of providers in Colorado. These are the Doctors and other healthcare providers who actually take care of injured workers. This team is responsible for more than half of our business spending, which makes sense for a workers’ compensation insurance company. It oversees overall provider customer service, provider credentialing, contracting, measuring clinical outcomes, compliance, and the physician advisor program and pharmacy expenses. Provider Network Management is also responsible for eliminating unnecessary waste in medical expenditures, and for both employee and provider education. The medical provider community is a key stakeholder group for Pinnacol and the Provider Network Management team conducts surveys and focus groups to listen to this constituency and to find new ways to anticipate providers’ needs and to help them navigate the complexities of workers’ compensation.

Another team you may not be familiar with is our Medical Payment Services group. This team quickly and accurately processes all the bills providers submit to Pinnacol. They audit these bills for proper coding, educate providers about successful billing practices and they are responsible for ensuring appropriate medical expenditures. The team also supports insurance operations through its medical payments liaisons who are responsible for coordinating all facets of medical payment activity for insurance operations. Each liaison is assigned to a business team in insurance operations for one-stop-shop support such as providing information and processing bills associated with settlements and responding to provider complaints.

Coming soon!
Informed by all of the crucial input from their customers, Provider Network Management and Medical Payment Services will soon be recruiting for new positions to provide the level of support needed to meet Pinnacol's goal of supporting the best possible care and outcomes for injured workers. Stay tuned in 2016 as we announce these exciting job opportunities!

Looking for an Accountant...

Many of you are probably getting distracted by all the holiday preparations and looking forward to spending time with friends and family. I did want to let folks know that we are looking for an Accountant to join our finance team so we are actively seeking candidates who are perhaps interested in a new opportunity in 2016. 

This opening is for an Accountant II which means we are looking for an experienced Accountant with at least three years related experience. A Bachelors degree in Accounting or Finance is preferred though not required. Being a CPA would also be a plus. 

Our Finance team doesn't have many opportunities come open so this is a relatively rare chance to join one of the key teams at our company. This particular Accountant position will be be responsible for functions related to investment accounting and processing and insurance accounting and reporting. If this sounds interesting we would love to hear from you! As always we ask candidates to submit their expression of interest via our company website.

Insurance Careers abound, but have you ever considered one?

I've said this before and its probably self-evident - when you were in the fifth grade and the teacher asked what you wanted to be when you grew up you most likely didn't even think of insurance as a potential career path. When I was at that age everyone wanted to be astronauts, rock or sports stars, the President, etc. I've worked in the insurance industry for 18 years and have found it to be an exceptionally rewarding career path not only for myself but for those I have helped get into the field.

The sad thing is that most people don't know enough about an insurance career to consider it as an option and that is a problem for the insurance industry. I was reading an article from Nielson Marketing Services this morning that was discussing the fact that the insurance industry continues to struggle to attract talent. 

As the article points out the median age of insurance industry workers in 2013 was 44.7 years old; for all industries, it was 42.4 years old. Of the 2.6 million insurance industry workers, only 131,000, or roughly 5 percent, were 20 to 24 years old. In contrast, 640,000 insurance industry workers were age 55 or older, which means roughly one quarter of these workers are nearing retirement.

Insurance careers are some of the most stable careers available as everyone needs coverage whether for auto, home, health, life and yes, workers' compensation coverage. Forecasters predict roughly 200,000 new jobs in the insurance industry by 2022 (hard to believe that's only 7 years away!). These jobs cover a wide variety of opportunities in everything from Claims and Underwriting to Information Technology, Safety Services, Actuaries, Business Intelligence, and Nursing. 

Millennials, like their predecessors, likely have not put much, if any, thought into exploring insurance as a career option. The article mentions a survey by the Griffith Insurance Education Foundation that found only 5 percent of millennials were familiar with careers in insurance. Some insurance companies, including Pinnacol, are recruiting future workers while they are in college or even high school and Pinnacol has actually endowed a Risk Management program through the University of Colorado at Denver Business School to help introduce the industry to a new generation.

If you are in the insurance industry, take some time to talk to others about what you like about your work. If you are not familiar with insurance as a career option, you owe it to yourself to check it out!

Nurse Medical Case Manager position now available with Pinnacol...

We are seeking a Medical Case Manager to work with claims personnel and other internal/external stakeholders to bring medical and claims issues to an expedient and cost-effective resolution and to provide our company and our stakeholders with best in class medical case management. A current Colorado nursing  license is required and candidates must be willing to attain and maintain case manager certification within 3 years of hire. Five  or more years’ experience in nursing strongly preferred.

Many nurses may be unaware of the opportunities that exist outside the traditional clinical environment. Most nursing schools don't expose their students to the career options that exist in the Occupational Health field and Insurance industry. One of these options is the case management and care of individuals who have been injured on the job. 

You might be curious about how these nurse roles are different from the role nurses traditionally are in. Working in the occupational health field and insurance industry offer some attractive advantages including:  regular daytime business schedules, no necessity to bid for shifts, and no need to work nights, weekends, and holidays. Another appeal is the less demanding physicality of these jobs with less standing and less wear and tear on the body.  Caseloads also tend to be more manageable as insurance companies such as Pinnacol generally have state of the art systems that make it easier to document patient care and manage caseloads. 

Pinnacol's  Medical Case Managers consult with claims representatives regarding the medical aspects of claims while interacting telephonically with injured workers and  providers to ensure recovery, successful return to work, and returning the injured worker to their pre-injury condition. Some of these positions work on more complicated long-term cases requiring critical and strategic thinking skills and involves the comprehensive, in-depth, medical review of records within a legal framework.  All Medical Case Manager positions participate in consultation with physicians, occupational and physical therapists, external case managers, specialists, and legal staff.  While these positions generally do not provide direct patient care, nurses involved in this type of work are critical in helping move cases along and ensuring positive outcomes. 

It is interesting to note that most nurses in these positions come directly from the clinical environment and represent all types of specialties. The work environment is team-based and nurses interact on a daily basis with other team members including claims representatives, underwriters, auditors, legal counsel and administrative support personnel.  Nurses drawn to these types of positions tend to bring a strong desire to learn, adaptability to change, the ability to educate those around them, while creating a balance of empathy and the promotion of well-being for the injured worker. 

For the Medical Case Manager position substantial training is done and appeals to every type of learner in that there are visual, hands-on, one-on-one, classroom and self-study components. The work is varied and challenging so learning continues well after the formal training is over. While most nurses have never been directly exposed to the availability of these types of career options, many find them to be well worth exploring at some point in their careers. 

If the Medical Case Manager position sounds of interest we would love to hear from you! We ask candidates to please apply via our company website.