Health Providers and Employee Assistance Programs

Employers frequently ask for risk-related determinations from an employee's personal health care provider, a request that very often places the health provider, the employer, and the employee in an awkward, sometimes conflicted and often confusing, situation. For health providers, including personal doctors, organizational EAP's and industrial clinics, their role is to provide care for their patients. When these entities provide information to employers about an employee's work status, they are being asked to assume a different role that at times could be in significant conflict with their role as advocate for their patient. Moreover, they may be asked to make determinations in areas where they lack specific expertise or where the information available is limited or uncertain.

In such instances, rather than engaging in risk-management activities, mental health providers can seek a third party assessment of their patient directly from Stone and Associates or refer the employer to us. This strategy allows the health provider to maintain the role of advocate and health provider for their patient while also responding to the patient's need to provide medical conclusions related to their ability to perform their job to their employer. This structure not only helps the provider to maintain appropriate focus on the patient but also protects the provider from undermining the doctor-patient relationship through communications that are perceived as adversarial to their interest. This also helps protect the provider from the potential liability that might accrue if, in putting the patient back to work, there is a disastrous outcome for the employee-patient and/or to third parties.

For example, if an employee's doctor signs a return to work letter, it is often not clear what the implications of the clearance are, what the conclusions are based upon and whether the return to work permission is taking the liability interests of the employer into consideration. That is, an employee's health care provider may have no risk assessment or forensic background, may know little about the demands of their patient's job, and may have very limited information about actual risk-relevant circumstances on the job. Seldom do communications from health providers indicate the basis for job-relevant recommendations, their level of expertise on the demands of the job, or even whether a recommendation is being made in the interest of the employee, the employer, or both.

Major services we provide

  - pre-selection evaluation of individuals for sensitive positions

  - fitness for duty evaluations

  - return to work evaluations

  - disability evaluation

  - critical incident evaluation and management

  - forensic interviewing and investigative strategies

  - training