Key Objectives:
Participants in this working-session Roundtable will hear briefly from researchers about common technical and methodological challenges. Participants are encouraged to share their own insights and experiences in this interactive discussion of strategies and methods for working with workers' compensation data to promote occupational health objectives.
Brief Summary:
There is a recognized need for improved utilization of administrative datasets for public health surveillance of work-related injuries and diseases. One example of an administrative dataset that states can use is workers’ compensation (WC) data. Workers’ compensation systems often contain information for each filed claim about the type of injury that occurred, the employee who was injured, and the employer where the injury took place. Several challenges prevent the routine use of WC data for targeting surveillance, outreach, and intervention. Calculating precise industry or occupation-specific rates require using one or more additional data sources to determine the number of full-time equivalents (FTE) as a denominator. Rates by industry involve additional steps to guarantee comparable coding in the claims and denominator sources. Additionally, the coding systems used in each state vary, as does the level of access to employment data available to state health departments. Researchers in several states are using state-level WC data to generate reliable rates of injury by matching WC claims to denominator databases. Methods to address the coding and standardization of key data elements across states, the consideration of different denominator sources for rate calculation, and the treatment of public sector and multi-establishment firms are currently being developed and refined. States continue to evaluate the utility of WC data for purposes of ongoing surveillance and research; make recommendations for improving their state data systems; and explore innovative ways of making WC data and data findings more accessible to policy makers, community-based organizations, labor groups, academics, and other stakeholders.