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Abstract
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The California workers' compensation program provides medical care and indemnity benefits to workers who suffer on-the-job injuries or illnesses. California law mandates an annual assessment of whether injured workers in the state have adequate access to quality care, and the RAND Corporation was asked to help answer that question over three years.
The key objective of this study is to describe access to medical care among injured workers in California, as mandated by Section 5307.2 of the California Labor Code. This study includes analysis of medical billing data from Version 2.0 of the Workers' Compensation Information System (WCIS), which was rolled out starting in April 2016. There were several significant changes underlying data infrastructure in Version 2.0, and this study offers a first examination of the new version of these data.1 Although the sample that we analyze in this study is not exactly comparable to the Year 1 and Year 2 sample, we highlight differences throughout this study. In particular, in previous analyses, the sample excluded medical bills with missing or incorrect information that was a part of the so-called orphanage. In Version 2.0 of the data, claims are rejected if information is incorrect or missing.2 We also used a provider identifier in this report that was different from what we used in previous reports, which yielded a larger sample of unique providers.
Overall, our estimates using the new data for 2016 were relatively similar to those presented in the Year 2 study, although we did not test for statistical differences due to differences in the samples. Nonetheless, estimates using Version 2.0 of the WCIS Medical Bill data suggest stability or slight improvements in most measures when compared with the Year 2 estimates.
Language: en |