What Are MSDs Costing You?

Musculoskeletal disorders are the most common and costly injuries in the workplace today. The good news is they don’t have to be; MSDs are preventable.

Use our MSD cost-savings estimator to see how much an MSD solution could save you.

(Video Transcript) Your MSD Prevention Opportunity

If you’re like most safety managers, you struggle with the challenge of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs).

They are the most common and costly injuries in the workplace today, accounting for about a third of all injuries.

There is good news and bad news here. The bad news is that with an aging workforce and rising healthcare costs, these injuries are likely to increase and become more expensive if you don’t do anything about it.

The good news is that these injuries are preventable with the right systems in place. This provides you with an opportunity to make an impact for your company and the people under your care by improving health outcomes and maximizing human performance.

To help you quantify the value of MSD prevention, we’ve provided a free MSD cost-savings calculator on our website. You can customize the inputs of the calculator to see the size of your prevention opportunity. This is extremely valuable information as you try to gain buy-in for your ergonomics and MSD prevention initiatives.

So, how big is your MSD prevention opportunity? Let’s find out.

To start, you’ll enter your number of annual MSD recordables. To do this, you could take the average of the last two or three years, you could use the last 12 months of MSDs, or you could estimate your MSDs for this year based on how things are trending.

For this example, we’ll use 5 MSD recordables.

Next you’ll enter in your average treatment cost per MSD if you know it. If you don’t know it, the calculator uses $30,487 as the average treatment cost and you can just use that default setting.

Based on your number of annual MSDs and the average treatment cost per MSD, the calculator will return your annual direct MSD costs.

The next input in the calculator is your indirect cost multiplier. Indirect costs of MSDs can be up to 20 times the direct costs so in the calculator you can choose a conservative multiplier, an average multiplier, or a high multiplier depending on what you’re most comfortable with. As you can see, these are all relatively conservative. For this example, let’s use an average multiplier.

The multiplier you choose is then used to arrive at your annual indirect costs.

Now that we have the direct and indirect costs, the calculator adds those up to arrive at your total annual cost of MSDs.

The last input in the calculator is the prevention strategy. This is important because the strategy you choose will determine the effectiveness of your MSD prevention efforts.

With an ergonomics-only strategy, you can expect a program effectiveness of 59%. With an ergonomics + early intervention strategy, you can expect a program effectiveness of 76%.

For this example, let’s use the best strategy to get the best results.

So now that we know our current MSD costs and we’ve chosen a prevention strategy, the calculator estimates what you can expect to happen.

It returns your annual MSD cost savings and then it also returns your 3-year, 5-year, and 10-year potential cost savings.

These long-range cost-savings estimations are provided to illustrate the value of long-term thinking and to highlight the cost of short-term inaction. The longer you wait to implement your MSD solution, the more your inaction will cost you. The earlier you get started with your MSD solution, the more value you’ll get out of it.

If you start now, you can make a significant long-term impact for your organization.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that there are many other benefits to ergonomics and MSD prevention that are not represented here. MSD solutions like ergonomics and early intervention can improve productivity, help you build a higher quality product, improve employee engagement and retention, and contribute to a health and safety culture you can be proud of.

No matter what industry you’re in, improving musculoskeletal health outcomes and maximizing human performance can help you accelerate safety excellence and be a competitive advantage for your business.

Of course, the greatest impact you can make is to prevent a painful and unnecessary experience of an MSD injury for your people.

If you would like help getting started with an MSD solution or you need help making the case for one, we offer a free, no-obligation consultation with an Injury Prevention Specialist. We’d love to meet you, learn about your situation, and provide any guidance we can. So schedule a free consultation today and we’ll talk soon.