Public/Private Ergonomic Venture Prevents Surgery, Saves Taxpayers' Dollars

In a sweeping movement to make the NY State's environmental protection police force totally paperless, each of the 500+ officers was issued a notebook computer. Police officers, in general, are larger than average people. More than one first line supervisor, whose job includes "rolling-up" subordinates' reports, doing lots of cutting and pasting from environmental statutes, and preparing citations, found that large people using small computers often results in pain, outages from work, surgery, rehabilitation, and the expenditure of one heck of a lot of the taxpayers' money! One such supervisor underwent three expensive surgeries for repetitive strain injuries - each one costing the state's workers' compensation insurance reserves over $25K. Faced with the likelihood of two more such surgeries, he was advised, by a prevention-oriented physical therapist, to try an alternative solution instead. She worked with Contour Design to come up with a unique integration of the state's notebooks with Contour's RollerMouse devices. This done, the two surgeries were avoided. The investment of $190 for one RollerMouse saved in excess of $50K. Great melding of economics and ergonomics! The potential sum of $125,000 in claims for just this one person could have funded the investment in RollerMouse units for EVERY officer on the force and left $20,000 in the state's coffers. This is just one of many examples of where good intentions - going paperless - but disregarding "spill-over" effects can come back to haunt. And another example of where systemic thinking in a private/public venture can minimize - if not obviate - those "spill-over" effects!