Brokers spend most of renewal season talking about rate. The more useful conversation this year may be about who is treating the claim once it is open - and Concentra's decision to bring in a new chief medical officer with 16 years on the payer side is a useful entry point into that discussion.
Jill Rosenthal, MD, MPH, joins Concentra on September 1 and takes the chief medical officer title on January 1, 2027, succeeding John Anderson, who retires after 33 years with the company. She spent more than 16 years as chief medical officer at Zenith Insurance Company, leading medical strategy and quality initiatives for employers and injured workers, before returning to an organisation where she previously served as area medical director. She also currently serves as 2026 president of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
The move mirrors one Arthur J. Gallagher made in January, when the brokerage created a first-of-its-kind chief medical officer post for its US Benefits division and appointed Christine Hale, MD. That two large organisations on opposite sides of workforce health - a brokerage and an occupational health provider - both decided this year to install dedicated physician leadership is worth noticing when advising clients on which partners to steer them toward.
The reason clinical leadership is drawing this kind of investment comes down to what is actually happening inside claims. Enlyte's 2026 Envision Trends Report, released in June, found that workers' comp claim frequency has stayed flat to declining nationally, but medical severity has not. Allowed medical costs per claimant rose 9.5% between 2022 and 2025, reaching $4,398, and the number of services billed per claimant climbed 12.3% over the same period.
Enlyte attributed the increase to greater service density rather than longer claim duration, meaning injured workers are receiving more treatment within similar timeframes, not staying out of work longer. Behavioural health involvement in claims has grown 15.3% since 2022 and now adds roughly 10% to overall claim severity.
That data matters for a renewal conversation because premium alone no longer tells the full story of what a client is paying for. NCCI's 2026 State of the Line report found medical claim severity grew roughly 6% in 2024, with indemnity severity rising by a comparable margin.
Pain management now makes up close to 30% of annual medical cost per claim, and for the costliest claims - those exceeding $5 million in total incurred losses - medical expenses account for around 90% of total cost.
A client with flat claim counts can still see a materially worse renewal if the claims they do have are more medically complex. That complexity is exactly what a provider's clinical leadership is supposed to manage down.
Having run medical strategy from the insurer side at Zenith, Rosenthal has seen firsthand how claims decisions on the payer side interact with treatment decisions on the provider side - the friction point brokers navigate every time a claim drags on longer than it should.
In her new role she will direct Concentra's national clinical strategy, covering physician leadership, quality and patient safety, evidence-based care and medical innovation, working with the company's clinical and operational leaders.
"Dr. Rosenthal brings an exceptional combination of national leadership, payer expertise, and deep knowledge of occupational medicine," said Matthew DiCanio, president and chief financial officer at Concentra. "Her experience will help us continue evolving our clinical capabilities while delivering even greater value to the employers and employees we serve."
Rosenthal said: "Returning to Concentra is an opportunity to build on the extraordinary legacy Dr. Anderson created and the standard he helped establish for occupational medicine. I am honoured to carry that legacy forward, while continuing to innovate, strengthen employer partnerships, and advance the specialty."
The practical stakes show up clearly in Travelers' 2026 Injury Impact Report, based on more than 1.2 million workers' comp claims filed between 2021 and 2025, which found injured workers miss an average of 80 workdays even as overall injury rates decline.
The report pointed to an ageing workforce and first-year employees as the two groups driving that figure - both populations where the quality of the clinical relationship, not just the policy terms, tends to determine how quickly someone gets back to work.
Concentra has operated for more than four decades, offering coordinated occupational health services including injury care, physical therapy, onsite health services, telemedicine and data analytics through a national network of clinics.
As medical severity rather than frequency becomes the number renewal conversations turn on, which network a client's claims run through - and who is setting clinical policy at that network - is a question worth asking before the renewal date, not after.
