For example, if your company has had an increase in carpal tunnel syndrome claims and you are trying to justify the purchase of keyboard holders to make workstations ergonomically correct, you can look at how much your mod and therefore your premium increased as a result of these claims. The results can be striking; for example, a single $4,000 claim may increase a small company’s premium by $10,000 to $12,000 over a three-year period. Imagine how much more powerful your funding requests for safety programs will be if you can back them up with these types of numbers. For instance, you might say to senior management, “It will cost us $20,000 to install keyboards at every workstation, but we could have already saved $65,000 if we had made this change four years ago, and our claims are continuing to rise by 15 percent a year.”
To perform this calculation, you must subtract the primary and excess (if any) portions of the loss from the totals used in the mod calculation. The resulting mod will be the mod without the loss. The difference between this mod and the actual mod will be the mod impact of the loss. This difference multiplied by the estimated premium yields the cost of the loss in terms of increased premium dollars. Multiplying this value by 3 (the number of years that the loss is in the calculation) will provide an estimate of the ultimate three-year cost of the loss.
