ENHANCING THE WORK INJURY COMPENSATION CLAIM PROCESS

The WICA provides compensation to employees who suffer work-related injuries, work-related illnesses or occupational diseases. WICA is a “no-fault”, expeditious alternative to civil claims and focuses on fair and efficient processing of claims by the WICD.

To speed up the processing of WIC claims, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Thinkplace were engaged to respectively re-engineer WICD’s processes, and to better empower and equip injured employees to independently pursue their claims, thereby reducing the workload of our WICD staff. At the end of their projects, PwC came up with 7 operational and 12 IT recommendations, while Thinkplace carried out three new prototypes and suggested six recommendations.

WICD had studied and accepted most of the recommendations, which can be broadly categorised under Communications Improvements, Closer Collaboration with Hospitals, Claim Process Improvements, and IT Enhancements. These are targeted for implementation in FY2016.

CHECK CLAIM STATUS VIA SMS IN 4 LANGUAGES

The SMS check claim status service was implemented in June 2014 to allow any party involved in a work injury compensation claim to check on the claim status using SMS, a simple service that almost everyone has access to. Parties could also choose to subscribe to the SMS service to receive progressive updates on the claim status. This service was initially available only in English. It was further enhanced to make it available also in Chinese, Tamil and Bengali, the native languages of the three most common nationalities of work permit holders in Singapore. This enhancement was implemented in August 2015.

This service acts as a self-help tool so that queries to officers would be reduced and resources involved in managing such queries would be re-channeled to work on more value-added activities. It will also reduce the number of walk-in customers at MOMSC’s counters as well as phone enquires, to enquire on WIC claim statuses.