You may not want to hear this, but Ogilvie II is probably worse for Defendants than Ogilvie I. ((Photo courtesy of Lawrence Whittmore)) Check out page 32:
if within five years of the date of injury it later becomes clear that the employee’s individualized proportional earnings loss is significantly higher or lower than anticipated, a party may seek to reopen the issue of permanent disability by challenging the originally used DFEC adjustment factor.
A company once told me someone had offered to build permanent disability calculators for their website in three months for $7,500. One said six months and $20,000. Recently, another suggested it would take them a year and $40,000. My response is usually some variation on “You’ve got to take that deal. You’re wasting your time talking to me.”
It’s no big secret that building a great product takes a lot of work. The important thing to remember is that just because something is easy-to-use, that doesn’t mean its easy-to-make. ((Visit the link for a PDF of a cut-and-fold iPhone. Thanks Gizmodo!))
Difficult-to-make iPhone
Let’s take the iPhone for example. Everyone will concede its an easy phone to use. However, it was released more than two years ago on 6/29/2007. ((Wikipedia link.)) In that time the other players – BlackBerry, LG, Nokia, and Palm have all been trying to catch up. If this easy-to-use phone were easy-to-build everyone would have their own version.
Look, there’s no special magic to building a website like this. Really, anyone can do it. All you have to do is learn the calculations inside-and-out, deconstruct the math involved in the various calculations, learn some client and server side programming languages, learn a content management system, make it all work together, keep current on changes in the law, start all over again each time the law changes, and earn the respect of the workers’ compensation community. Once done, you’ll have your very own workers’ compensation calculator website!
To return to the lesson of the iPhone, building a touch screen phone that can play music and surf the web is totally doable. Doing it right is another matter entirely.
Late last week a user asked for a new feature. ((Thanks Dennis!)) He wanted to be able to perform the Ogilvie DFEC rebuttal calculation and have the results e-mailed to him. ((Photo courtesy of Vernhart)) Well, I built it! ((Why, what did you do with your Saturday morning?))
To e-mail yourself a calculation, perform the calculation as normal. When the website returns your calculation, it will say “E-mail Me!” Just click that button and it will send an e-mail to the address you used to register for this website.
However, here’s the cool part: I’ve installed this new e-mail system into every calculator! ((I haven’t installed it in some of the EAMS lookup functions)) No more having to copy and paste! Just click one button and your calculation will show up in your inbox! ((If you filled in the boxes for Applicant, WCAB #, and File #, it will include this information in your e-mail as well. This is only for your convenience and not a requirement.))
Although I intend this to be a paid-subscription-only feature, I am going to leave it open for all users while I get some feedback. So, what do you think? Please leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail!
As I mentioned in the prior post in this series, my first few versions of this website and its workers’ compensation calculators did not use MySQL. The initial versions of this site only saved information – which meant I only had to use PHP to open a file on the server, add an extra line of information, and then close the file. This had several problems:
Once my website became more popular, it was not uncommon to have more than one user online. That meant the server tried to open the file – but couldn’t since it was already open. This caused the program to freak out.
In order to view just a little bit of information, I had to download the entire file. This got crazy pretty quickly.
Each time the file got larger, it would take slightly longer to open, append with more information, and close.
MySQL is an incredible tool for storing, organizing, and retrieving a large amount of data. Like PHP, it is also open-source. This means it is:
Well supported. There are lots of online resources and books to help you learn.
Secure. Lots of people spend a lot of time thinking of ways to prevent security vulnerabilities.
Customizable. You can configure or even rewrite it, if you wish.
Interoperability. You can save it to just about any format – including MS Excel spreadsheets.
Free. Unlike Oracle or any of the MS alternatives, it is totally free.
So, why did I avoid MySQL? I didn’t want to have to learn a whole new programming language. I had to learn how to set up a database, tables within the database, how to search for information in a table, how to put information into a table, and how to change information which was already in a table. There was a lot of trial and error. I ended up doing some pretty cool things in the process of learning this language. Some examples:
Teaching others some of the basics of MySQL
Writing a program for cataloging books
Writing several programs which performed various calculations to track invoices, billings, etc
Setting up several blogs/websites
The end result of learning this language is a more interactive website. One of the last incarnations of this site was a version that would show different color schemes, advertisers, and messages depending upon the user. All of this was made possible by large amounts of data stored in MySQL.
Thus ends my technical overview of my workers’ compensation permanent disability calculators! If you have any questions, please feel free to email me or leave a comment below!
