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Introduction to Treatment Guidelines

Most workers' compensation systems strive to provide quality medical care to occupationally injured or ill workers at a reasonable cost to the employers subject to the statutory act. Treatment guidelines generally attempt to define treatment standards and ranges for specific injuries and/or disabilities. 1

It is generally believed that treatment guidelines are an effective tool with which to help accomplish the above public policy objective. Treatment guidelines can be state specific guidelines adopted by a state workers' compensation agency, or can be proprietary and used by the private sector to identify cases that may need additional attention. Not all state workers compensation agencies have adopted treatment guidelines, and even when they do, the condition for which they provide guidance and the level of enforcement vary. Of the twenty five or so that have developed them or were in the process of developing them in 2001, few have guidelines for more than the most common occupational injuries. The most common treatment guidelines in workers compensation are for low back, upper extremities, lower extremities, and carpal tunnel injuries.

As a part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Workers' Compensation Health Initiative, three projects related to treatment guidelines. These were designed to widely disseminate treatment guidelines and to determine whether or not the use of the treatment guidelines helps to achieve the public policy objective above:

1. ACOEM- Dissemination and Implementation of ACOEM Medical Practice Guidelines. This project disseminated the treatment guidelines recently developed by the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine for the neck, back, upper and lower extremities. Copies of these guidelines and how to use them effectively can be ordered from OEM press .
   
   
2. University of Colorado's- Development and Testing of a Data Collection System for Assessing Clinician's Compliance with Occupational Treatment Guidelines. This project's goal was to collect reliable data at the clinical level to assess provider compliance with ACOEM guidelines and evaluate the association between practices and patient outcomes. The Data-scannable Clinical Assessment tool (future link here) they developed to be used by multiple clinics in multiple states is included here.
   
   
3. Stratis Health's- Minnesota Workers' Compensation Program: Mandatory Treatment Parameters Evaluation was designed to determine how the Minnesota state-based WC treatment parameters for low back pain affect the cost, quality and outcome of health care. The Employee survey's used in this project and the Methodology Developed are included  here.