Improvements to the Rating of Impairments from Injury (original) (raw)
Alan Colledge, MD, Medical Director, Utah Labor Commission. E-mail: farmboyac@aol.com Gregory Krohm, Executive Director, IAIABC. E-mail: gkrohm@iaiabc.org Even primitive workers compensation schemes had intuitive systems for cash awards for permanent injury, with amputation of extremities being the easiest cases to assess and assign specific benefits.1 Most modern workers compensation systems have complex rules for awarding cash payments for differing degrees and types of loss of bodily function after healing from a work injury. Such systems specify benefits for certain classes of injury, after the worker attains maximum medical improvement, based upon a measurement of the permanent harm that was done by the injury. A persistent problem in this system has been the lack of a consistent and reliable metric almost always measured by a physician of the nature and extent of the loss of use of a body part or bodily system.
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