Capturing cases in workers' compensation databases: the example of neck pain.

BACKGROUND

There is a need to more accurately enumerate workers with musculoskeletal injuries who make lost-time claims to workers compensation boards. The objective of this study is to develop an approach to more accurately enumerate these workers.

METHODS

Lost-time claims to the Ontario Workplace Safety & Insurance Board (WSIB) were reviewed. Using neck pain as an example, nature of injury and part of body codes were identified to classify cases. Claims of a random sample of 434 claimants were reviewed. The proportion of claimants classified as having neck pain was computed.

RESULTS

The proportion of claimants classified with soft-tissue injuries to the neck varied from 0.88 for codes including "neck/cervical region," 0.69 for "back region" to 0.05 for those coded as "shoulder/upper arm."

CONCLUSIONS

Restricting the enumeration of injuries to specific part of body codes can lead to a gross underestimation of the magnitude of soft-tissue disorders in epidemiological studies using workers' compensation data. The proposed approach leads to more accurate enumeration.