WCRI recap

Closing out MCM’s coverage of WCRI’s annual meeting, here’s a few final observations.
In general, this was one of the better WCRI meetings I’ve attended over the past fifteen years. The material was more current, the focus was on issues near and dear to my heart (lots of research on drugs, pricing, and utilization of medical services), and attendance was robust. WCRI’s also recognized the influence of press and social media, and worked diligently to accommodate both.
One of the sessions addressed the oft-asked question “Do work comp fee schedules affect the actual prices paid for medical services?”
The answer? Yes.
But not consistently.
According to data provided by WCRI, states with the highest prices for medical services are generally those that do not have few schedules. The non-FS states also exhibited higher growth in costs than those jurisdictions with fee schedules.
However, my home state of Conn. was one of the states in the ‘high price’ group but it has a fee schedule, albeit a particularly high one. Illinois was even pricier but there’s a lot more to that, namely the IL FS was a pretty loose one (and was one of the reasons reform was passed earlier this year).
Interestingly, there was a BIG variation in medical prices paid with the highest prices 2.5 times greater than the lowest. There’s been much discussion and research into this in the past, and the correlation isn’t very strong.
Note that this research addressed price – and not cost. While price is one component of cost, its influence is often overshadowed by utilization. Moreover, price is not directly linked with cost. For example let’s look once again at Connecticut. While we have high prices, we don’t have high costs. In fact, CT’s costs are consistently about average among WCRI’s study states.
Finally, I’d vote for WCRI to move their conference to the first quarter instead of the same month as National WC. The two conferences compete for a similar target market, and moving to a different date may increase attendance as heading to Las Vegas one week only to pack up and travel to Boston the next is tough. (National WC can’t move as they have a 5 year facility contract.)