Shifting the focus of strategic occupational injury prevention: Mining free-text, workers compensation claims data

Abstract

The current analysis applies the software SAS ® Text Miner to the mining of the free-text component of workers compensation claims data. It describes these methods with reference to claims within the state of Victoria, Australia from 1992 to 2002 for two groups called ‘Car and Delivery Drivers’ and ‘Wood Industry Workers’. It suggests that text mining can be used as a stand-alone tool for the analysis of free-text descriptions of occupational injury or combined with coded data to investigate sub-categories of injury. By manipulating the original description of the injury, text-mining can offer more detailed analyses of certain types of claim and shifts the focus of strategic prevention from broad statistics or coded groups of information to the descriptions people use to explain their injuries and accidents.