The goal of the project was to use the data in the Workers' Compensation Board (WCB) of
British Columbia's data warehouse to develop a statistical model that could predict on an
ongoing basis those short-term disability (STD) claims that posed a potential high financial risk
to the WCB. We were especially interested in identifying factors that could be used to model the
transition process of claims from the STD stratum to the vocational rehabilitation (VR) and long
term disability (LTD) strata, and forecast their financial impact on the WCB. The reason for this
focus is that claims experiencing these transitions represent a much higher financial risk to the
WCB than claims that only progress to the health care (HC) and/or the short term disability
(STD) strata.
The sample used to investigate the conversion processes of claims consists of all STD claims
(323,098) that had injury dates between January 1, 1989 and December 31, 1992. Although high-risk
claims represent only 4.2 % of all STD claims, they have received 64.3% ($1.2 billion) of
the total payments and awards ($1.8 billion) made to July 1999. Low-risk claims make up 95.8%
of all the claims but only receive 35.7% ($651 million) of the payments and awards. Moreover,
the average cost of high-risk claims ($86,200) is 41 times higher than the average cost of low-risk
claims ($2,100).
The main objective of the project was to build a reliable statistical model to identify high-risk
claims that can be readily implemented at the WCB and thereby improve business decisions. To
identify high-risk claims early on, we used logistic regression modeling. Since ten of the most
frequently observed injury types make up 95.72% of all the claims, separate logistic regression
models were built for each of them. Besides injury type, we also identified STD days paid and
age of claimant as statistically significant predictors. The logistic regression models can be used
to identify high-risk claims prior to or at the First Final STD payment date provided we know the
injury type, STD days paid and age of claimant. The investigation showed that the more STD
days paid and the older the injured worker, the higher the probability of the claim being high-risk.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10515 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Urbanovich, Ernest |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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