Predicting Work-Related Disability and Medical Cost Outcomes: Estimating Injury Severity Scores from Workers’ Compensation Data

Abstract

ISS was significantly associated with work disability and medical cost outcomes for work-related injuries. Injury severity should be considered as a potential confounder for occupational injury intervention, program evaluation, or outcome studies, and can be estimated using existing software when ICD-9-CM codes are available.

Ocular prostheses in the last century: a retrospective analysis of 8018 patients

“…6 Moreover, while workrelated eye injuries are more frequent in young workers and afflict the society due to loss of occupational workforce, injuries in older workers often lead to higher levels of disability, with consequently higher costs for the health system. [7][8][9][10][11] It is interesting to underline that while the rate of work-related trauma remained unchanged, the overall incidence of traumatic injuries decreased progressively over the years, probably due to better standards of safety and/or better prevention strategy campaigns for domestic accidents, road accident, or other kind of accidents including fire-works and sport accidents. 12 Nevertheless, traumatic injuries still represent the first cause of ocular prosthesis need, with 54% of all patients in our study population and a significantly higher prevalence in males, which may be explained by a higher number of accidents of various kinds, more active games, and more dangerous sports in males.…”

A New Method to Classify Injury Severity by Diagnosis: Validation Using Workers’ Compensation and Trauma Registry Data

“…Injury severity measures may also be important when predicting the likelihood of clinical interventions such as hospitalization or surgery, when predicting claim costs or future wage loss, or when evaluating the effectiveness of a clinical or workplace intervention. The identification and validation of severity measures and case mix adjusters is an important occupational health services research priority [9-11]. …”

“…In particular, AIS has more face validity and empirical support as a measure of initial injury severity than do hospital admission or length of stay, both of which can be related to co-existing conditions, health status, and trends in insurance coverage and standards of care [13-16]. AIS-based injury severity scores have been validated for prediction of mortality [17-21], and recent studies have established their association with occupational injury outcomes such as work disability and medical costs [11, 22, 23]. AIS-based injury severity scoring is theoretically appealing, since it estimates initial injury severity as opposed to the more indirect or more downstream severity proxies sometimes used in occupational injury research based on WC or other administrative data (e.g., industry, occupation, early hospitalization, amount of time loss compensation [6, 11, 24]).…”

“…AIS-based injury severity scores have been validated for prediction of mortality [17-21], and recent studies have established their association with occupational injury outcomes such as work disability and medical costs [11, 22, 23]. AIS-based injury severity scoring is theoretically appealing, since it estimates initial injury severity as opposed to the more indirect or more downstream severity proxies sometimes used in occupational injury research based on WC or other administrative data (e.g., industry, occupation, early hospitalization, amount of time loss compensation [6, 11, 24]). However, AIS was developed to describe motor vehicle crash-related injuries, and is most useful for discriminating relatively severe levels of trauma.…”

“…In contrast, for injury research based on WC claims, there are typically large numbers of relatively minor injuries and small numbers of the most severe injuries [11]. WC billing data may contain ICD-9-CM diagnosis codes, but typically do not contain AIS scores.…”