Early detection of high-risk claims at the Workers' Compensation Board of British Columbia

Early detection of high-risk claims at the Workers' Compensation Board of British Columbia

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Article ID: iaor20041910
Country: United States
Volume: 33
Issue: 4
Start Page Number: 15
End Page Number: 26
Publication Date: Jul 2003
Journal: Interfaces
Authors: , , , ,
Keywords: financial
Abstract:

We developed a combined decision-analysis and logistic-regression for identifying high-risk claims at the Workers' Compensation Board of British Columbia (WCB). The early detection of such claims and subsequent intervention is likely to reduce their eventual cost and to speed up worker rehabilitation. High-risk claims are extremely costly to the WCB; for the approximately 321,000 short-term disability claims with injury dates between 1989 and 1992, high-risk claims accounted for $1.2 billion (64 percent) of the total payment of $1.8 billion, even though they constituted only 4.2 percent of the claims. We developed separate logistic regression models for each injury type. We found that the age of worker and number of workdays lost were predictive of high-risk status. We used decision analysis to develop a classification rule that has high out-of-sample predictive power. The WCB has incorporated these results in a claims-profiling scorecard, which identifies claims needing early intervention. We estimate that our method saves the WCB $4.7 million annually.

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