Abstract
Background: All states in the USA have established Workers’ Compensation (WC) insurance systems/programs. WC systems address key occupational safety and health concerns. This effort uses data from a large insurance provider for the years 2011–2018 to provide estimates for WC payments, stratified by the claim severity, i.e., medical only, and indemnity. Methods: Besides providing descriptive statistics, we used generalized estimating equations to analyze the association between the key injury characteristics (nature, source, and body part injured) and total WC payments made. We also provide the overall cost burden for the former. Results: Out of the total 151,959 closed claims, 83% were medical only. The mean overall WC payment per claim for the claims that resulted in a payment was $1477 (SD: $7221). Adjusted models showed that mean payments vary by claim severity. For example, among medical only claims, the mean payment was the highest for amputations ($3849; CI: $1396, $10,608), and among disability and death related claims, ruptures cost the most ($14,285; $7772, $26,255). With frequencies taken into account, the overall cost burden was however the highest for strains. Conclusions: Workplace interventions should prioritize both the costs of claims on average and the frequency.
Highlights
Occupational injury surveillance data are crucial to designing effective preventive interventions [1].Currently, there exists no single, comprehensive national injury surveillance database, especially for nonfatal injuries
Workers’ Compensation (WC) coverage is provided to all or most workers for whom such coverage is required and covers over 90% of the United States (USA) wage and salary workers [3]. Because of their design and performance, WC systems address a key concern for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health given the implications for occupational safety and health and post-injury outcomes [4]
In addition to estimating mean payments using generalized estimating equations (GEE) models, as a supplement, we provide estimates of the “burden” posed by each injury characteristic by multiplying its frequency in the data by its mean cost
Summary
Occupational injury surveillance data are crucial to designing effective preventive interventions [1].Currently, there exists no single, comprehensive national injury surveillance database, especially for nonfatal injuries. There are several databases that provide an opportunity for state or federal level injury surveillance While some of these may only be demographic in nature, other contain information regarding related health outcomes and potential risk factors, such as workers compensation (WC) datasets. WC coverage is provided to all or most workers for whom such coverage is required and covers over 90% of the USA wage and salary workers [3] Because of their design and performance, WC systems address a key concern for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health given the implications for occupational safety and health and post-injury outcomes [4]. WC systems address key occupational safety and health concerns This effort uses data from a large insurance provider for the years 2011–2018 to provide estimates for WC payments, stratified by the claim severity, i.e., medical only, and indemnity. Results: Out of the total 151,959 closed claims, 83% were medical only
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