Studies Show Workers Comp Patients Are Faring Worse - The Question is 'Why'?

Two recent peer reviewed studies have come to the same conclusion - the workers compensation patients that they assessed were having worse post-surgical outcomes than non-workers compensation patients who underwent the same procedures. 

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Even though the workers compensation patients in the study were younger and in some ways healthier on average than the non-workers compensation group, in the year that followed their surgical operation, the workers compensation patients had lower return-to-work rates and reported a greater degree of pain and disability as well.

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To be clear, these studies were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Neurosurgery focusing on the spine and involved nearly 10 years of data from a large number of hospital systems, encompassing almost 40 thousand patients who underwent surgeries on a particular area of their lower spinal columns. 

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That said, there doesn’t seem to be a readily apparent cause that links these spinal injuries/procedures to the comparatively bad outcomes experienced by workers comp patients relative to the non-workers comp counterparts who had the same medical issue and received the same type of care to correct it. While the workers compensation group had greater proportions of patients who smoke and who are obese, whether or not a patient had workers comp status or not seems to have a greater correlation to these negative post-operation experiences.

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The studies did suggest, however, that there could be a number of other factors that may very well have contributed to this phenomenon, including socioeconomic disparities between the workers comp and non-workers comp groups. Differing ranges of average injury severity between the groups could be influencing the results too.

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Further, and perhaps most notably, there may also be differing incentives between workers comp and non-workers comp patients in assessing the severity of their injury and resulting disability in terms of maximizing disability payments and other related benefits that may become available as on-the-job injuries worsen. 

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The authors note that additional study is necessary to evaluate the various factors that are causing these disparities in post-surgical responses between workers comp and non-workers comp groups in order to determine which factors are most responsible. Once the main causes are identified, they can then potentially be better addressed in order to minimize their negative impact, which is especially important in light of the additional treatment expenses incurred by workers comp patients on average, as well as the decreased quality of life and increased likelihood of developing pain-management-related addictions as well. 

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