This episode is brought to you by Berkshire Hathaway Homestay Companies, BHHC, a leading national writer of workers' compensation insurance. Our AMVEST rating of A++15 enables us to offer coverage for a wide variety of businesses under all market conditions. BHHC is committed to providing injured workers with compassionate care and access to timely high-quality medical treatment and support. Our Lost Control Services, Proactive Claim Management, Medical Cost Containment, and Fraud Prevention contribute to superior claim outcomes for our policyholders.
Hi, this is Dave Garcia, President of Rancio Mesa, and thank you for joining me in listening to today's podcast brought to you by Studio One, our safety and risk management network. In today's show, I'll be talking with Margaret Hartman, the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Berkshire Hathaway Homestay Companies. Berkshire Hathaway is one of the key partners at Rancio Mesa that provides our clients with the risk management and insurance solutions they need to ensure the success of their companies. We greatly appreciate and value our Berkshire Hathaway partnership.
During today's show, I'll be talking with Margaret about what she feels are several of the reasons why so many businesses have chosen to trust their insurance needs to Berkshire Hathaway. Margaret, welcome back to Studio One. Thanks for having me. I've been great.
Thanks. Awesome. Hey, you know, before we get started, I know and our audience is about to find out that you are a huge Notre Dame sports fan. So I wanted to get your opinion on Tyler Buckner.
He's a quarterback at Notre Dame who's from San Diego and looks to have a shot at the starting job next year. What insights there can you share? Well, that's a great question. Just to start off, I could spend the rest of the podcast talking about Notre Dame football.
I think Tyler had a great first year at Notre Dame. He got a shot at being in some games and not just, you know, it's a blowout and so they're going to throw him out there, but in some pressure situations, which I think will give him a leg up next year and he will definitely have a shot at being QB one starting job. Well, okay. So you know, I'm not going to let you off the hook that easy.
We need to know for the record, will he be QB one or not? Oh my gosh. Well, I cannot answer that. We've got a new coach now.
We have to see what he has to say. I was surprised that he didn't get into the festival, but I do think he's going to have a really good opportunity. I can't answer whether he's going to get the nod or not. Okay.
I have to say that's a little disappointing, but let's move on. Okay. Let me off the hook. I'll let you off the hook this time.
So shifting to the insurance marketplace, as I said in the opening, can you share with us some reasons why you think so many businesses have trusted their workers compensation insurance needs to bridge our pathway? Well, I think, you know, we've been in the workers comp space for a long, long time here. We've been a very consistent, stable market here in California. We have wealth of services.
We are a workers compensation specialty carrier. So this is what we do. We have a lot of expertise in the line and we actually get very, very good results. I mean, for us, it's not about just writing the premium and getting the business in the door, but taking care of our customers, providing great service and getting great claims results, which doesn't only help our policy holders, but helps us too.
You know, and we recognize that and really value that because as you know, we like to track how quickly claims are closed and for what amounts they close at. And you've always been a company that outperforms the industry averages in those regard, is there anything you attribute that to specifically? I think it's part of the fact that we do have a big focus on claims, but we do it ourselves with our own people. We really don't outsource anything.
We have very experienced safety and health professionals that are doing our loss control services. Our claims professionals have very low caseloads. We train them from scratch. We train them to do things our way.
And as you said, Dave, we pay very close attention to industry benchmarks. So the benchmarks that come out aren't us just saying, hey, we're outperforming. It's actual workers' health insurance rating girl comes out with those statistics. And we look at how we perform relative to industry.
And we are closing claims faster than industry and at lower pricing than what the industry is getting. So I think part of why we get those results is really because we hire the best people. We make sure that our medical management professionals are all certified coders. So we're getting very, very good medical cost containment results.
We hire our own nurses that are doing our utilization review for us. So basically, it's kind of keeping things in-house and paying attention to those things very closely that I think has led to the good results that we're getting on the claims side, which again, in turn, helps our policy holders keep their experience modifications low and resulting in lower premium costs for them. Yeah, we've really experienced that with you on many of our clients. And our clients speak really highly of that.
Not only are the claims being closed quicker and at a lower cost, but the injured worker is treated really well in the process. And that's really what a lot of businesses, in addition to the business side of wanting to manage their experience modification and their future premium costs, they want their employees to be well taken care of. So I think from our perspective, Berkshire Hathaway does that better than anyone. So I really commend you guys for the services on the claims side because that's really for a policy holder when the rubber meets the road.
Up until that point, they're just paying premium. Right. And our mission statement, one of the key things about it is that we want to make sure that we're providing compassionate care to injured workers. So that's a very, very important thing to us.
It gets drilled into our claims professionals from the time they start our training programs. Yeah. And I think, as you mentioned earlier, establishing that culture by training your own people, you're not undoing the process from some other company. They're only learning the Berkshire way, which is really beneficial.
I'm sure it's not inexpensive to do it that way, but it's probably the right way to do it. So kudos to you. You know, Margaret, since we last spoke and as we kind of look a little bit back into 2021 and then forward into 2022, are there any new services or initiatives that you've implemented currently that it will be expanding or is there something new that you might be introducing that you could share with us today? I'd say we've continued to expand our nurse triage services.
As we started out, we thought that that would be a great service for our customers, but we've also found that there's a lot of cost savings to us too by providing those services. Claims get reported a lot quicker that way and we get people to appropriate care a lot faster. One of the interesting things with the pandemic is even pre-pandemic, we were very focused on that we focus on virtual care and trying to promote telemedicine as a way to get quality care to injured workers, particularly if they were in outlying areas, it was hard to get to a clinic and to get them that care faster. The pandemic just kind of put telemedicine on steroids.
I mean, it just got huge, but we kind of noticed that telemedicine has started kind of going back to those normal percentages. So we've really made an effort to continue virtual care because we've done surveys for injured workers that have had virtual medicine type visits and the results have been incredibly high. They're very satisfied. They don't have to leave their home and they get that quality care a lot faster.
Now, is it something on the horizon where you're looking at expanding that telemedicine into different areas of treatment in addition to just the normal medical treatments? Exactly. We've partnered with a couple of telemedicine firms across the country, so it's now available in all states where they allow us to do it. And we've expanded into the fields of orthopedics and we're also looking at psych treatment as well, which psych treatment actually lends itself really well to virtual care because it's kind of a talking out type of treatment.
So we've had some really good initial results with that as well. Yeah, I really respect that about you and your companies that you're always looking forward. You're never satisfied with where you're at and you're always looking to how do we provide a better outcome to our policy holders and vicariously to their individual employees. So I'm excited to see where this all goes with you guys, honestly.
One of the things at Rancho Mesa last year, we were very privileged to be selected as one of the few agencies in the country that you've given access to what you call, Bertrand United. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is and how you selected your initial agency partners for that? Sure. So as I said, I think it's really important to have expertise in a line of coverage, which we are a Workers' Comp specialty company.
But there are some policy holders that want to have all of their insurance with one carrier. And so in order to answer those needs, we partnered with Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance, a sister company that's going to provide casualty lines to go along with the Workers' Compensation. So since this was an initial joint venture and as luck would have it, we're trying to launch this in the middle of the pandemic, we were very careful about the partners that we chose. So we really wanted our most trusted agency partners to have access to this.
And Rancho Mesa, as you know Dave, we've been partners for longer than we care to admit, a lot of years, and we've had a proven track record with your agency of writing a lot of business together and helping a lot of our customers. And the type of clients that you have are the type of businesses that we want insured. Okay. Yeah, great.
Like I say, we were really honestly blown away to be selected. When you think there's 35,000 agencies in the country, and I don't know the exact number, but I know it's less than two handful nationwide that have this ability. And to be one of those, we felt really, really special. So we're looking to try to help develop that, find out where it works, where it does and how to make it better.
And I'm proud to say that we've written several, more than several now, joint policies between Berkshire United. So I love the name, by the way. I don't know who came up with that. But when you're combining two sister companies as you described them and trying to come up with a name for it, Berkshire United makes total sense.
So was that you? Margaret? Yeah, I did come up with that name. But it was voted on by a group.
I wasn't the only decider. That's it. It's a really good name. So good to those to you then.
Thank you. So does Berkshire United at least right now, are they initially targeting any particular industries? Right. Well, one of the other reasons that we were really excited to partner with you is your expertise in certain verticals, one of them being construction.
So construction classes are a big part of what we're writing in Berkshire United, as well as some manufacturing risk and then some hospitality kind of main street, retail stores, hotels, restaurants. Those are the main areas of focus right now. We hope that we're going to be expanding that. Yeah, and just to my next question, I was going to ask you, do you think that appetite will expand any further during 2022?
Yeah, I think it will. We've already expanded into a couple of different new classes and you've helped open our eyes to see some more that I think that we could do. But we're just starting out that I'm really excited about what the future holds because it's a very, very important initiative to us. Yeah.
Thank you for your partnership. You wrote the very first account and you write the most accounts in that program. Great. We appreciate that a lot.
Well, you're welcome because every policy we write is a new family member to Rancho Mason. We appreciate it. And we'd be able to say what? Yeah, I know you do.
I think it's why our two companies work so well together. So Margaret, before we close today, is there anything else you'd like to add or discuss to today's podcast? I think just to say thank you again. It's been long term great partnerships that our companies have had together.
And part of that is a lot of what you do to make our policy holders better risks. I mean, some of the things that you provide here are really amazing and I haven't seen anywhere else. But you're doing with risk management, your KPIs, very, very impressive. So thank you.
I commend you for all you do for your customers. So thanks, Margaret. Well, Margaret, once again, thank you for your time today and given us a quick update on what's happening at Berkshire Hathaway and the ways you're helping both your policy holders, our policy holders and all of your agency partners. So Margaret, thank you for joining me today in Studio One.
Thanks, Dave. Okay, that'll do it for today's show. I want to thank you for tuning in to Studio One, our Safety Risk Management Network, and listening to today's show. So until next time, please stay welcome.
This is Alyssa Burley with Rancia Mesa. Thanks for tuning in to our latest episode produced by Studio One. For more information, visit us at Rancia Mesa dot com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.