Imagine you're a Marriott employee who gets hurt on the job. California law allows Marriott to restrict your care to doctors in its Medical Provider Network (MPN). This means you have to find the roster of Marriott MPN doctors who are eligible to treat you.

Good luck.

Imagine you're a doctor. An injured Marriott employee contacts your office to schedule an appointment. You need to confirm that you're in Marriott’s MPN before you can render treatment, so you need access to Marriott’s current MPN provider roster.

Good luck.

To facilitate access to care under MPNs, California Labor Code requires employers to maintain a website listing the doctors in their MPNs. Yet, Marriott's MPN website:

• Is listed under the name of one of its vendors
• Requires a username and password to access
• Is buried in a redirect from its vendor’s URL to the website of a different company
• Does not include legally required information

To our knowledge, the California Division of Workers’ Compensation (CA DWC) has taken no action to address these problems or similar problems with other MPNs. This is the CA DWC’s typical pattern: interpreting statutes narrowly in favor of payers and vendors while strictly enforcing requirements on providers.

The result: the private equity firms backing payers and vendors reap profit from employers’ workers’ comp premiums, while accessing care becomes ever more difficult for injured workers, as providers flee the system.

The Hidden Marriott MPN Website

By establishing an MPN, Marriott restricts its injured employees to doctors chosen by Marriott. Marriott is required to furnish a DWC 7 form to alert employees of their rights in the event of an injury and provide MPN information, including the MPN website address.

California Labor Code Section 4616 requires every MPN to:

• Maintain a website listing all participating doctors and providers
• Update that roster at least quarterly
• Provide the MPN website address to the CA DWC

The CA DWC is responsible for writing the regulations that implement this law. Those regulations do not require an MPN website to be clearly associated with the employer or insurer. They don't prohibit burying the website under layers of vendor URLs and redirects, nor do they require the website to be publicly accessible without a password.

Because the CA DWC and its regulations allow it, Marriott's MPN website is functionally useless to its injured employees and providers trying to treat those employees.

Just to see the list of providers eligible to treat a Marriott employee requires a painstaking process:

Step 1: Find the Marriott MPN. Search for "Marriott" on the CA DWC's online MPN list, and you'll find only one entry, for a terminated MPN. Injured workers and providers must (somehow) know that Marriott’s active MPN (MPN ID #3074) is managed by Genex, a vendor that provides network services.

Step 2: Find the Marriott MPN website. The CA DWC lists the Genex MPN website address as www.genexservices.com. But that URL redirects to the Enlyte website, Genex's parent company. There's no mention of "Medical Provider Network" or “Marriott” anywhere on the Enlyte page.

Step 3: Access the physician roster. On the Enlyte website, you must click the "Find a Genex Provider" link in order to access Marriott’s MPN. From there, you’re redirected to a login screen requiring a Username and Password, with no indication of how to obtain either.

For an injured Marriott worker trying to find an eligible doctor, or a provider trying to confirm that they can treat that worker, Marriott’s MPN odyssey is a dead end at every step.

Marriott’s MPN: No MAA Information, No Legal Notices

California law explicitly requires every MPN website to include:

• Instructions on how to contact the MPN's Medical Access Assistants (MAAs)
• A toll-free MAA phone number, available 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday
• Instructions for obtaining all legally required notifications about the MPN that employers must give to injured workers

We could find none of this legally mandated information on Genex’s Marriott MPN website.

The requirements listed above are straightforward. The CA DWC is simply allowing Marriott’s vendors to ignore California law, once again failing to enforce requirements that would assist injured workers and providers to navigate the system.

The only phone number on the MPN page is for reporting "inaccuracies in the provider data." This follows a paragraph of fine print in which Genex states that its provider information is "subject to change" and that Genex "does not warrant the accuracy of the information or the quality of medical care."

A further step, according to the MPN page, is to verify all data on it, though it’s not entirely clear how this should be accomplished.

Marriott & CA DWC: A Failed Workers' Comp System

To recap:

• California law requires MPNs to maintain a website where injured workers and providers can find eligible doctors and get help from an MAA.
• The Marriott MPN website is a vendor’s parent company site with no discernible connection to Marriott, which is password-protected and fails to list MAA contact information or legal notices.
• The vendor managing Marriott’s MPN website disclaims responsibility for accuracy and quality of care.

Once again, Marriott epitomizes why California comp costs more and takes longer to resolve claims than in the rest of the nation, and why so many California providers refuse to treat injured workers.

This dystopia is only possible under the aegis of the CA DWC, whose apparent willingness to selectively enforce the law is an invitation to the kind of chaos that enriches the private equity firms behind vendors like Genex and Enlyte.

For UNITE HERE Local 2 members, to whom we addressed a previous article, this is what Marriott has built. You're restricted to an MPN that you may not be able to navigate, managed by a vendor that won't guarantee the accuracy of its own information or the quality of your care. This should be on the table in your next contract negotiation.

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