Recipe for Success
Employees at The Cheesecake Factory thrive thanks to an enjoyable, team-driven environment. They want to work. The company’s approach to risk management helps them do just that.
By Kristen Beckman
Kurt Leisure knows he could significantly lower the risk profile of The Cheesecake Factory by outsourcing food preparation, but that would diminish the quality of the food patrons have come to expect at the 45-year-old restaurant chain that serves 2,500 people a day per location.
“We wrestle with that from a claims and injury standpoint,” Leisure said in a recent interview. “I can engineer the risk out by sending it into a commissary to have other people do it, but then the food tastes different than if we make it in house from scratch every day. So I have to manage what we have under our roof, which is lots of knives, hot stoves, fires and fryers. Whenever you are dealing with hot food and tile floors and moving at a fast pace, things can sometimes go wrong.”
Leisure is vice president of risk services at The Cheesecake Factory, which he joined 25 years ago after working for another large restaurant company for 12 years. With nearly 40 years of experience addressing risk at restaurants, he has deep experience building workers’ compensation and risk management programs from the ground up.
The Cheesecake Factory is one of three winners of the 2024 Workers’ Comp Risk Management Award for Excellence.
“When I came to The Cheesecake Factory,” Leisure continued, “they were a small mom-and-pop restaurant that didn’t have a formal risk management department. We had the opportunity to build the program from scratch, which was really fun and interesting and challenging at the same time.”
“The mindset of the company was not on safety and claims management,” he added. “They were focused on getting food out the door.”
Leisure said his first challenge was to get the company to think proactively about claims and the impact they have on business as well as earning the respect and trust of operators and the management team. As a frequency-driven company, The Cheesecake Factory sees a variety of minor injuries, including cuts and burns.
Building a Menu
In 2016, The Cheesecake Factory was faced with both a challenge and an opportunity to revolutionize its workers’ compensation program, which served more than 42,000 employees working in 300-plus full-service restaurants throughout the United States and Canada.
Leisure built a partnership with third-party administrator CorVel to enhance injured worker care assessment and delivery through a 24/7 nurse triage and telehealth program, bill review and pharmacy solutions. The nurse triage service allows employees to report an injury from any location at any time and quickly receive a clinical consultation by a registered nurse who assesses injuries and determines the most appropriate course of action. Compliance with the program has been high.
“Our managers are good at following recipes, so when I say every employee who is injured needs to be called into the nurse triage, with very few exceptions, injuries get called into the nurse triage,” Leisure said. In fact, 90% of the company’s injury cases are handled through this nurse resource, which has resulted in 15% fewer emergency room visits and more than $660,000 in savings.
Leisure then became interested in implementing an injury visualization function through telehealth allowing nurses to assess injuries by video. At the time, the concept of telemedicine was gaining some traction on the group insurance side but was rare in the workers’ compensation space.
“It wasn’t initially super successful because people really wanted that brick-and-mortar feel,” he said. But COVID-19 changed that as people began embracing telemedicine as an alternative to visiting medical facilities in person.
In its latest iteration, the visual consultation service has expanded to a complete virtual care offering through which the nurse routes the injured worker to a concierge service which obtains the worker’s medical history and places them in a virtual waiting room for a call with a physician. Due to employees receiving fast-tracked care, The Cheesecake Factory has experienced a 19% reduction in costs per claim.
Leisure and CorVel also have implemented a claim number system that addresses problems associated with bills for services not linked to a claim. This best practice, along with the service’s clinical expertise, has contributed an estimated $700,000 in savings and a lower litigation rate.
Overall, the transformed workers’ compensation program has delivered remarkable results, including over $7.7 million in bill review savings and a 99.9% generic efficiency rate for pharmacy benefit management. The long-term impact of the initiative includes increased employee engagement and enhanced recovery outcomes, as well as decreased costs of risk.
However, Leisure said it is difficult to quantify the success of programs in light of factors such as increasing medical costs.
“I think the true indicator of our success is our litigation rate – how many people are so frustrated with this process that they hire an attorney,” said Leisure. “Yes, I’m looking at the cost, but I don’t want to nickel and dime my way through this. People get frustrated when you send them to a medical doctor and they think their care is compromised because it’s the cheapest option in the area. My costs are in litigation, so if I can get that piece managed, that’s a success.”
Taking Risks
You might think someone who has built a career around mitigating risk would be risk averse himself, but Leisure is enthusiastic about exploring new technologies and trying things that haven’t been tried.
“I’m always thinking of innovation and what we can do to drive better outcomes for our injured staff, to take the friction out of the workers comp system,” Leisure said. “I’m just not that passive claims person who sits back and says, ‘Well we’ve always done it this way, let’s continue to do it that way.’ I love breaking the mold.”
That includes finding partners like CorVel who will break molds with him.
“You know, we put new stuff on our menu all the time,” he said. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but if you don’t try it, then you can’t understand what works and what doesn’t.”
Ultimately, Leisure sees his job as getting employees back to work.
“Some people live paycheck to paycheck in our business, and getting them the care they need is important,” he said. “Most have never had a workers’ comp claim. Some don’t even know what workers’ comp is.
“We want to help them understand we have a benefit for them instead of them worrying about paying their bills,” Leisure said. “They want to come back to work. It’s a very upbeat environment at our company and people miss being part of the team, so the faster we can get them back into the restaurant and back with their team, the better. I think that’s what’s rewarding.”