Development and initial application of a harmonised multi-jurisdiction work injury compensation database

Workers' compensation schemes provide funding for wage replacement and healthcare for injured and ill workers. In Australia, workers' compensation schemes operate independently in different jurisdictions, making comparisons of health service use challenging. We sought to develop and deploy a new database of health service and income support data, harmonising data from multiple Australian workers' compensation jurisdictions.

We worked with workers' compensation authorities from six Australian jurisdictions to combine claims, healthcare, medicines and wage replacement data for a sample of compensated workers with claims for musculoskeletal conditions. We designed a structured relational database and developed a bespoke health services coding scheme to harmonise data across jurisdictions.

The Multi-Jurisdiction Workers' Compensation Database contains four data sets: claims, services, medicines and wage replacement. The claims data set contains 158,946 claims for low back pain (49.6%), limb fracture (23.8%) and non-specific limb conditions (26.7%). The services data set contains a total of 4.2 million cleaned and harmonised services including doctors (29.9%), physical therapists (56.3%), psychological therapists (2.8%), diagnostic procedures (5.5%) and examinations and assessments (5.6%). The medicines data set contains 524,380 medicine dispenses, with 208,504 (39.8%) dispenses for opioid analgesics.

The development of this database presents potential opportunities to gain a greater understanding of health service use in the Australian workers' compensation sector, to measure the impact of policy change on health services and to provide a method for further data harmonisation. Future efforts could seek to conduct linkage with other data sources.