What is the Workers’ Compensation Board doing to improve the safety of workers’ private information when deciding what to share with employers?

We take privacy very seriously in our organization. Workers deserve to know that their private medical information is going to be protected. 

The AG looked at one particular part of our process – when an employer requests claim file information when a decision is under appeal. 

In these cases, we need to request medical information from a health care provider, who sometimes may make the first decision about what’s relevant to the claim at hand. 

Then, we go through that information manually, and we need to remove what is not relevant. It is a very manual process, and it involves reviewing many pages of often complex medical information.

We need to do better at this process. We want to get it right. We’re looking at other jurisdictions now to determine the best way to improve this process. And our new systems being implemented next week may give us better tools to work with as we do that.