CompScope™ Benchmarks: Multistate Comparisons, 7^th Edition.

CompScope™ benchmarks provide the most meaningful comparisons currently available for more than 60 system performance measures for fourteen large states. The states in this 7^th edition of CompScope™— Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin—represent over 50 percent of the nation’s workers’ compensation benefit payments.

This comprehensive reference book provides useful information on two central questions:

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

·         How is workers' compensation system performance changing over time?  

This report can help policymakers and others benchmark state system performance or a company’s workers’ compensation program. The benchmarks also provide an excellent baseline for tracking the effectiveness of policy changes and identifying important trends. 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.

 Illustrative findings:

• In Massachusetts, medical costs per claim with more than seven days of lost time rose 12 percent in 2004 claims (evaluated in 2005)—the fastest growth rate among the 14 study states in that year (similar to Pennsylvania). Growth in medical costs per claim in Massachusetts averaged 9 to13 percent per year over the past four years.

• Injured workers received their first indemnity payments faster in Wisconsin than in most other study states, mainly driven by faster speed of payment once the payor received notice of injury, which may have been influenced by the state agency’s efforts to monitor timely payments and to provide payors with feedback about their performance.

• In Michigan, costs per claim were lower than typical compared with 13 other large states. Three factors largely explain that result: (1) medical payments per claim were substantially lower; (2) the duration of temporary disability was lower than in the other wage-loss states; and (3) the weekly benefit rate was lower than expected, largely because of the benefit structure in Michigan.

• Indemnity benefits per claim in Florida fell nearly 11 percent in 2004 cases valued in 2005. Factors contributing to the recent decline include: an 8 percent drop in the duration of temporary disability (more than one week); a 14 percent drop in the average permanent partial disability (PPD)/lump-sum payment per PPD/lump-sum claim; and a 3 percentage point drop in the frequency of lump-sum settlements

The study used data from claims from injury years 1999 through 2004, evaluated as of March 31 of each year from 2000 through 2005, from WCRI’s Detailed Benchmarking/Evaluation database containing over 22 million claims.

The report contains separate state reports for 11 of the 14 study states (California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin).

CompScope™ Benchmarks, 7^th Edition. Carol A. Telles, Rui Yang, and Ramona P. Tanabe. February/March 2007. WC-07-26.