Economic impact of occupational injuries: resource allocation for prevention programs

Occupational injuries are a great burden on health care costs worldwide. We present the first detailed decision support system that investigates the total direct and indirect costs of individual occupational injury claims for a given year covering Austrian costs for a general injury insurance company (AUVA), employers, and the economy. We calculate total lifetime costs for each individual claim, discounted by 3%, amounting to 496, 306, and 552 million euros for the AUVA, employers, and the economy, respectively. Using Classification and Regression Trees, the detailed cost calculation provided by our decision support system is used to cluster all patients into risk groups according to several criteria such as age, gender, and job type.