CompScope™ Benchmarks, 8th 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 8^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.

Illustrative findings: 

• Overall costs per claim in Massachusetts were typical among the 14 study states. When examining changes over time, however, the study found that costs per claim grew rapidly in four out of five study years, including a nearly 10 percent increase in the most recent year (2005 claims evaluated in mid 2006). This recent growth was driven by rapid increases in medical costs per claim (nearly 11 percent); indemnity benefits per claim with more than seven days of lost time (10 percent increase); and the cost of delivering medical and indemnity benefits to injured workers (9 percent increase).

• Injured workers received their first indemnity payments faster in Wisconsin than in most other study states. Fifty-three percent of injured workers in Wisconsin were issued their first checks within 21 days of injury, compared to the 14-state median of 41 percent. Faster payments may have been influenced by the state agency’s efforts to monitor timely payments and to provide payors with feedback about their performance.

• Two offsetting factors were at work in Maryland, which largely explained why the overall costs per claim in Maryland were typical of the states in the study. Medical costs per claim with more than seven days of lost time in Maryland were among the lowest of the study states—33 percent lower than the 14-state median. However, the state had a higher proportion of claims that received income benefits (claims with more than seven days of lost time)—8 percentage points higher than the 14-state median of 21 percent.

• The average cost per claim of delivering medical and income benefits to injured workers in Pennsylvania was 22 percent higher than the typical study state for 2003 claims with more than seven days of lost time (evaluated in mid 2006), driven mainly by higher litigation expenses. Although Pennsylvania was not among the most litigious states in the study, defense attorney payments were 34 percent higher than the 14-state median. These higher payments may indicate that more hours of billable time were required to resolve cases in Pennsylvania, suggesting that the state has a somewhat more expensive and complex dispute resolution process.

The study used data from claims from injury years 2000 through 2005, evaluated as of March 31 of each year from 2001 through 2006, 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).