Nancy Schaefer, VP Sales and Customer Activation, Ascellus:

Risk stratification is not new in workers’ compensation...What that infrastructure typically sees is physical risk: injury severity, body part, surgical versus non-surgical. What it typically treats as secondary is psychosocial risk. That gap is the blind spot, and it’s proving expensive.

Claims with a behavioral health component run about 2.5 times more expensive than claims without one, according to NCCI research. The Workers Compensation Research Institute has reached a consistent conclusion from a different angle: in a study of more than 131,000 physical therapy episodes, injured workers with unaddressed psychosocial risk factors showed measurably poorer functional recovery than those without.

Read the full article on WorkComp Wire here.  The WCRI studies she cites are Importance of Psychosocial Factors for Physical Therapy Outcomes and A Primer on Behavioral Health Care in Workers’ Compensation.  Visit their pages on our website for more information, including details on how to get copies!