Based on the CompScope™ benchmarks, WCRI found wide variations in benefit payments and costs per claim, timeliness of payments and litigiousness, suggesting wide variations in performance for similar claims.

A comprehensive tool to help manage change, CompScope™ provides the most meaningful comparisons currently available for more than 60 system performance measures for twelve major states. These states – California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – represent about 50 percent of the nation’s workers’ compensation benefit payments. Using this tool can help policymakers and others benchmark state system performance or a company’s workers’ compensation program, assess the effectiveness of policy changes and identify important trends. The comparisons are more meaningful than those commonly seen, because they measure how different systems would perform if a similar set of claims were dropped into each system.

This reference book provides information on two questions central to workers’ compensation:

• How does the performance of a state system compare with that of other states?

• How are systems changing over time?

The study used data from WCRI’s Detailed Benchmarking/Evaluation database containing over 10 million claims from 1994 through 2000.

The study contains a separate section with findings for each of the 12 states.  Illustrative other findings that scan across the 12 states include:

• For a similar group of claims, the average total cost per claim for all paid claims in the highest study state, Texas ($4,513), was more than twice the average total cost per claim in the states with the lowest per-claim costs, Indiana ($1,921) and Wisconsin ($2,182).

• Growth in benefit payments per claim (medical and indemnity payments) accelerated in the most recent period studied in 9 of 12 study states. This acceleration was particularly strong in Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Texas – where the growth rate in the most recent period studied was at least 5 percentage points higher than the six-year annual average growth rate.

• Benefit delivery expenses – expenses associated with managing claims such as medical management, litigation, medical-legal exams – represented 6 to 15 percent of total payments made on claims with more than seven days of lost time. The percentage was highest in California, Florida, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania (12-15 percent); lowest in Indiana, North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin (6 to 8 percent). 

• Except for Indiana and Wisconsin, growth in benefit delivery expenses per claim in the study states slowed. Despite this deceleration in most states, benefit delivery expenses were still increasing at a double-digit pace in Illinois, Pennsylvania and Texas.

• Duration of temporary disability in California and Texas (16 and 17 weeks, respectively) was at least twice as long as it was in Wisconsin (8 weeks) for claims with more than seven days of lost time.

• In 7 of the 12 study states, roughly half of the injured workers were sent their first indemnity payments within 21 days of injury (for 1999 claims as of mid-2000 with more than seven  days of lost time). Performance, however, varied widely. Nearly 60 percent of claims in Massachusetts and Wisconsin received payments in this time period, while first indemnity payments in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee were at or below 40 percent.

CompScope™ Benchmarks: Multistate Comparisons, 1994-2000, Carol A. Telles, Aniko Laszlo and Te-Chun Liu. April 2003. WC-02-09.