Objective:
Evaluate the medical costs related to patient handling & mobility (PH&M) claims.
Methods:
Closed medical only and indemnity workers’ compensation claims were utilized for this exploratory study. In addition to the PH&M tasks, the claimants’ gender, age, tenure, and the claim lag time were also analyzed.
Results:
Generalized linear models indicated that variables related to tasks, claims’ number of open days and age of the claimants had meaningful effects on the adjusted medical costs for medical only claims. For indemnity claims, the number of open days of claims, age and tenure had meaningful effects. Gender had meaningful effects only for indemnity claims when classifying the claims by patient handling tasks versus non-patient handling tasks.
Conclusions:
Results showed that factors, other than the type of injury; meaningfully influenced the adjusted medical costs of indemnity claims.
This study provides business owners, human resource, insurance and occupational safety professionals an overview of the dynamics between workers' average weekly wage and workers' compensation outcomes. The understanding of these dynamics can lead to improved and effective interventions to lower occupational injuries' cost such as effective return to work programs.
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