Hammett, M., Jankosky, C., Muller, J., Hughes, E., & Litow, F. (2012). Physician Review of Workers’ Compensation Case Files: Can It Affect Decision Outcomes? Military Medicine, 177(1), 17-22. Retrieved September 1, 2012 from ProQuest.

In this module, you have learned about inferential statistics, hypothesis testing, and types of bias. For the assignment, please read the following article.Hammett, M., Jankosky, C., Muller, J., Hughes, E., & Litow, F. (2012). Physician Review of Workers’ Compensation Case Files: Can It Affect Decision Outcomes? Military Medicine, 177(1), 17-22. Retrieved September 1, 2012 from ProQuest. Write a 2-page essay that includes the following — as you have done in previous case studies, use subheadings to guide the flow of your paper:Provide the reference for the article (you can copy and paste it from this page)Introduce the topic of the article.Identify the research hypothesis for the study. If the hypothesis is inferred, you may state it in your own words. Identify the dependent variable and the independent variable(s).Identify the method for selecting participants in the study, if applicable.Discuss the particular types of bias in the studyWhat statistical testing procedure was used to analyze the results of the study?What ethical concerns, if any, would you have about the way the study was conducted? Please discuss any other concerns or potential problems with the study.What conclusions can you draw from your critique of the study? This should not be about your personal opinion about the topic, but your conclusions about how the study was conducted and what researchers should consider when planning similar studies.If you are unclear about any of the above terminology, review the homepage and background materials for Modules 1, 2, 3, and 4, as well as the PowerPoint presentations on bias and on research design.

ASSIGNMENT EXPECTATIONS: Please read before completing assignments. Copy the actual assignment from this page onto the cover page of your paper (do this for all papers in all courses).Assignment should be 2 pages in length (double-spaced).Please use major sections corresponding to the major points of the assignment, and where appropriate use sub-sections (with headings).Remember to write in a scientific manner (try to avoid using the first person except when describing a relevant personal experience).Quoted material should not exceed 10% of the total paper (since the focus of these assignments is on independent thinking and critical analysis). Use your own words and build on the ideas of others. When material is copied verbatim from external sources, it MUST be properly cited. This means that material copied verbatim must be enclosed in quotes and the reference should be cited either within the text or with a footnote.Use of peer-reviewed articles is required. Credible professional sources are used (for example, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, scholarly journals). Wikipedia is not acceptable.Cite all references within the paper and list them at the end. Please use APA style.

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MILITARY MEDICINE, Vol. 177, January 2012 17

MILITARY MEDICINE, 177, 1:17, 2012

INTRODUCTION
The history of Federal workers’ compensation legislation
goes back to the late 1800s, but the Federal Employees’
Compensation Act (FECA) of 1916 is the basis for the cur-
rent system. 1 The FECA covers all civilian employees of the
United States, except those paid from nonappropriated funds.
Special legislation provides coverage for a number of other
groups outside of the Federal government. All kinds of occu-
pational injuries and diseases are covered by FECA, and the
spectrum of medical issues that are presented for payment can
be complicated. The Department of Labor’s Offi ce of Workers’
Compensation Programs (OWCPs) administers the program.
The costs of the benefi ts paid to the employee are charged
back to the employing agency. Historically, the US Postal
Service has led the list of agencies with the most workers’
compensation chargeback, and the combined Services within
the Department of Defense always follow in the second spot.
The Department of the Navy typically leads all other Services
in total chargeback. The total chargeback fi gure for all Federal
claims from July 2008 through June 2009 was $2.73 billion,
and there were 250,673 claims handled during that period.
New claims totaled 129, 690 of that number. 2 This chargeback
fi gure underestimates the total outlay for workers’ compensa-
tion, because a provision of the FECA allows an employee

injured on the job to receive up to 45 days of pay and ben-
efi ts to stay home and recuperate from an injury. This is paid
directly from the employing agency, and the Department of
Labor does not track that cost.

The increasing cost of medical care, the increase in the
number of Federal employees, the aging American workforce,
and legislatively defi ned benefi t additions over time have all
contributed to a steady increase in the cost of the program. 3,4
The proportion of workers aged 55 years and older is pro-
jected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to increase by nearly
40 million by 2018, an increase of 43%. 5 This will make it the
fastest growing segment of the working population. Chronic
conditions can be aggravated by occupation and can pre-
dispose workers to increased rates of injury. 3 The burden of
chronic medical problems seen in the older workers will more
than likely have an effect on workers’ compensation cost in all
areas over time. Correctly identifying chronic conditions mas-
querading as occupational illness will present a challenge.

In 2000, Naval Sea Systems Command initiated a program
to limit the Navy’s liability for compensation costs that result
from occupational injuries and illnesses occurring at its bases.
A cooperative relationship developed between the injury com-
pensation specialists charged with managing this project at
the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and the Occupational and
Environmental Medicine (OEM) physician who was staffi ng
the shipyard clinic. In selected cases, the physician reviewed
the case fi le and would sometimes submit a medical opinion
letter to the claims examiner. The letter would support or
question the claim, based on the medical facts present in the
fi le. OWCP claims processing rules require the claims exam-
iners to consider input from the employing agency’s physi-
cian, but the agency physician’s opinion may not be the sole
basis for a case decision. 6 It appeared to the claim manag-
ers working in the program that favorable claim decisions
resulted in cases where the physician intervened early in the
process, and this outcome encouraged the Commander, Naval
Installations Command (CNIC) to formalize the procedures

Physician Review of Workers’ Compensation Case Files:
Can It Affect Decision Outcomes?

CAPT Mark E. Hammett , MC USN * ; CAPT Christopher Jankosky , MC USN † ; John Muller , MD, MPH * ;
Elizabeth Hughes , RN, MPH ‡ ; Francesca Litow , MD, MPH §

ABSTRACT Objective: To identify common attributes of Federal workers’ compensation cases referred to Navy phy-
sicians for medical opinions and to determine the impact of the review on the fi nal case decision. Methods: Retrospective
case study and descriptive analysis of 258 opinion letters written by physicians on referred cases from 2006 to 2010.
Results: Navy physician opinions were considered in the outcome in some of the cases, and there was a statistically sig-
nifi cant difference between the claim acceptance rate in the study population and the total population. Worker age was
correlated with certain claim types. Conclusions: There is preliminary evidence that the opinion letters of Navy physi-
cians infl uenced case decisions. Because of the selection bias in how the cases came to the study population, a prospective
cohort study is warranted to establish whether this conclusion and the other results noted are valid.

* Occupational and Environmental Medicine Department, Navy and
Marine Corps Public Health Center, 620 John Paul Jones Drive, Portsmouth,
VA 23708.

† Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics, Uniformed
Services University of Health Sciences, 4301 Jones Bridge Road, Bethesda,
MD 20814.

‡ ODU/EVMS MPH Program, Old Dominion University, Health Sciences
Room 3134, 4608 Hampton Boulevard, Norfolk, VA 23529-0288.

§ 1001 Indian Creek Lane, Wynnewood, PA 19096.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do

not refl ect the offi cial policy or position of the Uniformed Services University
of Health Sciences, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S.
Government.

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Physician Review of Workers’ Compensation Case Files

18 MILITARY MEDICINE, Vol. 177, January 2012

for examining claims and providing medical input by Navy
physicians. Several Navy physicians working at various loca-
tions volunteered to provide medical expertise to the claims
processors at CNIC, and, when it seemed appropriate, they
would insert opinion letters into the claim record early in the
claim adjudication process for OWCP to consider. Case track-
ing began in late 2006, and the descriptive results of that effort
are provided here.

Very few Federal agencies have physicians available to pro-
vide input into a given workers’ compensation claim, but phy-
sicians are the only ones, according to Department of Labor
claim processing rules, who can argue the issue of the claim-
ant’s diagnosis and the relationship of the diagnosis to the
claimant’s occupation. 7 The purpose of this article is to ana-
lyze and quantify the effects of medical review of the workers’
compensation claims, to highlight how OEM physicians can
assist non-physicians who are tasked with handling complex
claims, to encourage other OEM physicians to initiate local
program improvements, and to encourage more study of this
initiative.

METHODS
We conducted a descriptive epidemiological study on a
referred group of 325 workers’ compensation cases fi led
with Navy Injury Compensation Program Administrators
(ICPAs) from all over the United States, beginning in August
2006 until September 2010. The cases were forwarded by
the ICPAs through the CNIC Workers’ Compensation Offi ce,
where selected case information was entered into an Excel
spreadsheet (Microsoft, Redmond, Washington) for track-
ing purposes. The physicians had no input as to the type
of cases that were sent for review. The CNIC Workers’
Compensation Offi ce requested that the ICPAs send cases
that had not been adjudicated by the OWCP yet, or when
the ICPAs needed medical advice on how to proceed with
the claim process. The Workers’ Compensation Offi ce kept
track of numerous pieces of data about the cases, including:
the type of illness claimed on the case, the date that it was
sent to Navy physicians for comment, the date that it was
returned, the OWCP’s case decision, and a calculated dol-
lar fi gure of cost avoided (if the case decision was a denial
of the claim). Correspondence on all the cases was reviewed
to determine whether the Navy physicians’ reviews infl u-
enced the defi nitive action by the OWCP. Of the 325 pos-
sible cases in the database, 40 were excluded or combined.
Such exclusions or combinations occurred when multiple
claims by the same patient at the same time were grouped
into a single case analysis, when the Navy physician sim-
ply answered a question for the ICPA on the case and did
not write a letter to the OWCP or to the treating physician,
or when the Navy physician could not provide any support
because of inadequate medical record documentation. Key
variables collected on the 285 remaining cases included the
following: claimant age, gender, illness/injury claimed, date
the case was referred to the Navy physician, date the case

was returned to the ICPA, the claimant’s wage grade type,
the Navy physician’s recommended disposition on the case,
and the OWCP’s decision on the case. Some of these data
fi elds could not be ascertained in all 285 of the cases.

Descriptive statistics were calculated, and tests of asso-
ciation were performed using Excel (Microsoft) and SPSS
version 15.0 (SPSS, Chicago, Illinois). Using the k statis-
tic, we assessed the level of agreement between the physi-
cians’ opinions and the fi nal claim decision of the OWCP
in the cases where the decision was known. The two-sided
z -test was employed to compare the proportion of males in
the study population to the proportion of male employees in
a comparison population that was constructed from two dif-
ferent sources. Since the gender distribution of employees
working for the Federal government in the Wage Grade (WG)
category of workers is greatly different than those working
in the General Services (GS) category in the Federal gov-
ernment, we used the proportions of WG and GS workers in
the study population to create a composite comparison popu-
lation that more closely mirrored the distribution of claim-
ants. We wished to try and determine whether there was a
statistically signifi cant difference between the study popu-
lation’s acceptance rate and the Navy-wide acceptance rate
for workers’ compensation cases. To do this, we used the
z -test again to compare the proportions. Finally, we explored
the relationship between the claimant’s age and the type of
claim, using the one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA)
method.

RESULTS
The claimant’s age was available in 169 of the 285 cases, and
the ages ranged from 24 to 81 years old. Both the average age
and the median age of the study subjects were 55. The average
turnaround time on the cases sent to the reviewing physicians
was 14 days.

Musculoskeletal (MSK) problems were the most common
cause of injury and illness ( Table I ). MSK complaints were
subcategorized into regions of the body. Upper body com-
plaints were most frequently a diagnosis of carpal tunnel syn-
drome, but rotator cuff injuries were also well represented in
this group. MSK problems of the spine were most frequently
in the low back region, but cervical stenosis and arthritis was
also a frequent referral in this grouping. MSK problems of
the lower extremities were most frequently knee problems.
Hearing loss was the second most common category of claim
sent for review. The “central nervous system (CNS)” cate-
gory contained cases that, with one exception, contained head
trauma or chronic headache cases. The one exception was a
case of chemically induced leukoencephalopathy. The cases
in the “Psychiatric or Mental Health” category were exclu-
sively stress-related cases. The “Respiratory” category con-
tained mostly asbestos lung disease, but it also contained
several asthma and allergy cases. The “Other” category con-
tained a mix of cases that included a hernia, a retinal detach-
ment, an orbital fracture, and a deep vein thrombosis.

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Physician Review of Workers’ Compensation Case Files

MILITARY MEDICINE, Vol. 177, January 2012 19

The reviewing physicians recommended that the claim be
accepted in 40.7% of the cases referred (116 of 285). Of the
285 cases analyzed, there were 250 cases where the OWCP
decision on the claim was known. The case counts and the
percentages of agreement or disagreement are presented by
case category in Table II . The physicians and the OWCP
agreed on how the claim should be decided 63.2% of the
time (158 cases). This resulted in a k of 0.315 (confi dence
interval = 0.203–0.428) ( Fig. 1 ). A k from 0.2 to 0.4 is gener-
ally considered “minimal” agreement. 8

The OWCP’s claim acceptance rate on the study popula-
tion (where the case decision was known) was 72% (180 of
250). The OWCP’s claim acceptance rate for all Navy claims
in 2009 was 87.5% (5,025 of 5,756). (R. Slighter, unpub-
lished data, Civilian Personnel Management Service [CPMS],
Washington, DC) Using the two-sided z -test to compare the
two proportions, the difference in the acceptance rate between
the two populations was signifi cant at the 0.01 level.

Men fi led substantially more of the claims than women,
i.e., 82.5%. The percentage of males in the comparison popu-
lation was 78.5%. As mentioned above, the gender distribu-
tion in the work force is greatly different in the WG pay grade
system than that found in the GS pay grade system. Men com-

prise 90% of the workers found in the WG system. They only
comprise 59% of the GS pay grade. 9 The breakdown of the
pay grades in the claimant’s population we studied found that
63% were in the WG pay system (163 of 259) and 37% were
in the GS pay system (96 of 259). We used this proportion
and the gender distribution found in the Federal government
to derive a percentage of males to compare the claimant popu-
lation against the comparison population, which was 78.5 %.
The two-sided z -test performed to compare whether there was
a signifi cant difference between the male population of claim-
ants and the comparison population of workers showed that
there was no signifi cant difference between the two popula-
tions, p = 0.11.

Using the ANOVA, we tested the hypothesis that there was
no association between the claimant’s age and the category of
case. This hypothesis was rejected ( p = 0.024). Further inves-
tigation showed that the only signifi cant differences were
between age and hearing loss claims, CNS claims, and MSK–
spine claims. The mean age of the hearing loss claimants,
58.8 years, was the highest. The two categories showing the
lowest mean age were MSK/spine (51.7 years) and CNS
claims (46.3 years).

DISCUSSION
We recognize the selection bias inherent in our study. The
Navy ICPAs referred cases in which they noticed something
unusual, or which required further clarifi cation from a physi-
cian to help support or contest the claim. Given that bias, one
might expect that the overwhelming majority of cases would
have the Navy physician opposing the claim. This was not
the case. In this study, the Navy physicians recommended a
case decision in favor of the claimant in almost 41% of the
referred cases. The majority of those cases involved hearing
loss, and the reasons for that are fairly straightforward. First,
workers are not routinely removed from work because of doc-
umented hearing loss. Most workers are still capable of doing
the job, even though their hearing acuity is declining over
time. The worker is generally informed of the hearing loss,
and he or she is counseled on hearing conservation measures
that must be employed to limit further damage. Supervisors

TABLE I. Case Counts and Percentages by Type/Mean Age by
Case Category

Cases
% of Total

Cases Males Females
Mean

Age (Years)

Cancer 4 1.4 4 0 56.2
CNS 6 2.1 6 0 46.3
Dermatology 2 0.7 1 1 54.5
Hearing Loss 98 34.4 97 1 58.8
Psychiatric or

Mental Health
7 2.5 4 3 53.0

MSK, Upper 47 16.5 33 14 55.8
MSK, Lower 42 14.7 28 14 51.8
MSK, Spine 45 15.8 36 9 53.4
Respiratory

System
28 9.8 21 7 55.5

Other 6 2.1 5 1 55.0
Total 285 100 235 50 54.7

TABLE II. Agreement Between Physicians and OWCP by Case Category

MD “Accept” &
OWCP “Accept”

MD “Deny” &
OWCP “Deny”

MD “Accept” &
OWCP “Deny”

MD “Deny” &
OWCP “Accept” Totals

Cancer 1 2 0 0 3
CNS 2 3 0 0 5
Hearing Loss 60 7 7 20 94
Psychiatric or Mental Health 1 5 0 2 8
MSK, Upper 10 8 1 20 39
MSK, Lower 7 14 0 15 36
MSK, Spine 8 12 0 17 37
Respiratory System 6 10 0 9 25
Other 1 1 0 1 3
Total 96 62 8 84 250
Percent 38.4 24.8 3.2 33.6

20 MILITARY MEDICINE, Vol. 177, January 2012

are instructed to enforce hearing protection guidelines on the
job. The Navy has a threshold of hearing acuity, below which
the worker must be screened by an audiologist, otolaryngolo-
gist, or OEM physician for fi tness for duty. In practice, the
worker is generally not removed from the workplace when he
exceeds that threshold. Second, many workers come to work
for the Federal government with pre-existing hearing loss.
When the Department of Labor is considering payment of
scheduled awards for hearing loss, the government must pay
for this prior loss under the FECA. This precedent has been
frequently affi rmed by rulings of the Employee Compensation
Appeals Board (ECAB). The ECAB references other case law
precedents described by Larson. 10,11 The principle can be para-
phrased as “the Government must take the employee as it gets
them.” 12 The Navy physicians providing the opinions gener-
ally understood this concept and made no attempt to appor-
tion the prior loss, knowing that the case would be accepted
for full payment.

To compare the Navy physician recommendation to the
actual case decision, it was necessary to create a binary
result, i.e., the case should either be “accepted” or “denied.”
However, this oversimplifi ed many of the nuanced arguments
that the Navy physicians made. In some instances, the phy-
sician recommendation was classifi ed as “denied,” but the
physician’s recommendation really addressed those issues
specifi c to medical management, fi tness for duty, or return to
work in a light duty status. This physician input often included
recommendations that were implemented at the level of the
claimant’s health care provider, and it indirectly resulted in
a claimant returning to work. Thus, the binary nature of the
physician opinion classifi cation may have overstated the non-
concurrence rate between the physician and the Department
of Labor.

An item of interest is the difference in the ages of the
claimants, as made evident by the ANOVA test. The mean
age of the hearing loss claimant was the category of claim that
made the most impact because of the size of the claim num-
bers and the difference in the mean age. One reason for the
older population of claimant may be that the claimants wait
to fi le for compensation in the last year or two before retire-

ment. An alternative reason could be that there is some point
in the continuum of hearing loss where the claimant reaches a
level of disability that he fi les for benefi ts. Both explanations
seem plausible, and it is not obvious which is the more likely,
or if there is another explanation. The greatest absolute differ-
ence in category age vs. the population mean is seen in CNS
claims. Although there are only six claims, the absolute dif-
ference between the CNS mean age and the study mean age is
nine years. Looking at the individual cases, this makes sense.
Most of the CNS cases were associated with head trauma in
workers due to falls, and the cohort’s average age was skewed
by two young fi refi ghters who sustained head trauma perform-
ing emergency service.

Many Navy physicians’ letters illuminated facts from the
medical records that supported non-occupational causes of
injury or illness, contradicting the claimant’s personal physi-
cian. As an example, numerous claims were made by employ-
ees who experienced pain while doing routine activity at work,
such as knee pain when standing up from a chair. A visit to
the doctor demonstrated osteoarthritis and tears in a meniscus
of the painful knee. The treating physician would support the
claim that the meniscal tears were occupationally related, and
that should result in all workers’ compensation benefi ts for
surgical repair and rehabilitation of the joint, time off from
work for recuperation and rehabilitation, and all future prob-
lems with the specifi c joint injured at work. This post hoc,
ergo propter hoc argument has not been supported by the case
decisions of the ECAB, but the claims are frequently accepted
without debate by some claims examiners. 13 In these types of
situations, the Navy physician could intercede with informa-
tion that pointed the claims examiner to medical literature
showing where certain meniscal tears were most frequently
associated to the claimant’s osteoarthritis, and that there was
no convincing history pointing to a work event to substanti-
ate that the condition was occupationally related. There were
many complex cases where the Navy physicians’ information
proved critical in framing the decision to include other, non-
occupational, causes for a claimant’s injury/illness.

The effi cacy of the physician reviews is an important issue.
The position of some within the Department of Labor and the
CPMS of the Department of Defense was that the OWCP may
not even consider the Navy physician’s letter when making
their decision. This notion was disproven early in the course
of the project. Case and appeal decision letters obtained from
the ICPAs frequently used the exact words from the physi-
cian’s letters in the Statement of Accepted Facts on the case.
Many times the physicians were cited by name in the deci-
sion letters. (M.J. O’Leary, unpublished data, CNIC Offi ce of
Workers’ Compensation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) These
letters are not available in the public domain, but there are
three published decisions of the ECAB in which they name
the Navy physician and use the argument posed in the case to
help decide the appeal. 14–16

Another argument was that the OWCP claims exam-
iners would have decided the case regardless of what the

FIGURE 1. Agreement between Navy physicians and OWCP.

MILITARY MEDICINE, Vol. 177, January 2012 21

physicians opined. This argument is more diffi cult to address,
and it goes to the source of the authors’ motivation in describ-
ing the program in this article. The result of the z -test com-
paring acceptance rates for the study population (72%) to
the Navy-wide acceptance rate (87.5%) creates many more
questions than it answers. The selection bias that has already
been noted might be a reason why the difference exists. Other
explanations might include the fact that there was a big dif-
ference in the case mix between the two groups. The majority
of cases referred to the Navy physicians in the study were ill-
ness claims, and they are predominantly chronic in nature. A
large proportion of the claims seen in the comparison group
are injury claims, and these types of cases are much more cut-
and-dried. The physician’s review opinions might actually be
the explanation for the difference, given that the Navy physi-
cian’s exact words were used in some of the case decisions.
The difference is not likely due to chance, but we cannot
determine the reason based on the available data. In any case,
the differences in the acceptance rates seen between the study
population and the total population potentially represent tens
of millions of dollars in future cost to be avoided if unsubstan-
tiated claims are not accepted for payment. The uncertainty as
to why the difference exists, coupled with the potential cost
savings, argues for a better study design to test the hypothesis
that the physician opinion letters affect case outcome.

The economic impact of the physician opinions has always
been controversial. There was no issue of an incremental cost
increase to the Department of the Navy by adding the phy-
sicians’ assistance. The case load was spread to a group of
Occupational Medicine physicians who had experience in the
Federal workers’ compensation system, and they performed
the service in addition to their regular duties. The claims pro-
cessing infrastructure already existed, and it was staffed to
handle this process without additional personnel. However,
the “cost avoided” by a denied claim is very diffi cult to assess
(similar to that of an illness avoided by immunization). The
chargeback cost to the Navy in 2009 was $240,003,716. 17
The number of new claims accepted in that year was 5,025
(R. Slighter, unpublished data), a per claim cost of $47,762.
This overstates the per claim cost, as the chargeback cost con-
tains benefi ts paid on claims from prior years. There are ben-
efi ciaries in the system that are collecting full benefi ts of the
FECA that are in their 90s. 18 This is because the FECA cur-
rently allows for payment as long as the benefi ciary is certifi ed
as unable to perform the work they left because of the injury
or illness. It makes no difference whether they are incapable
of doing the work again as a result of their increasing age or
from other conditions that they have suffered in the interim.
Applying a cost per diagnosis code is diffi cult because a case
can have multiple diagnosis codes assigned to it, and they are
not assigned in order of importance. In any case, this type of
data is not maintained by the CPMS. It is not known if the
Department of Labor keeps statistics on cost that might be
used to assess the economic impact of the Agency physician’s
input into the claim record.

CONCLUSIONS
The authors’ intent in writing this article was to communicate
the outcome of the project and to encourage other agencies
in the Federal government to implement similar programs.
Although this project’s results pertain to agencies of the
Federal government and their employees seeking compensa-
tion under the FECA, the concept of using the employer’s phy-
sician to provide input into the claim may possibly be applied
to State Workers’ Compensation Programs.

Because the referred cases are neither a representative nor
a random sample of the worker population, conclusions about
the association of certain injuries or illnesses with worker age
or gender cannot be reached with any degree of certainty. The
reason, or reasons, for the difference in the acceptance rates
seen between the study population and the total claim popu-
lation cannot be discerned from this preliminary descriptive
study. The possible economic effect of using medical review
provides motivation to carry this project forward. The limita-
tions noted in this preliminary study argue for a better study
design. A prospective cohort study where groups of randomly
selected matched claims are split into two populations, one
that will receive physician review and one that will not, may
help establish whether there is a real difference in acceptance
rates. It would also be most helpful to have the benefi t of a
fi nancial analysis that can elucidate an acceptable metric of
cost avoidance.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We thank Mr. M. Joseph O’Leary and Mr. Joseph DiDomenico at the
CNIC Worker’s Compensation Offi ce, Philadelphia Naval Business Center,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for their assistance in facilitating the completion
of this project.

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“ Hammett, M., Jankosky, C., Muller, J., Hughes, E., & Litow, F. (2012). Physician Review of Workers’ Compensation Case Files: Can It Affect Decision Outcomes? Military Medicine, 177(1), 17-22. Retrieved September 1, 2012 from ProQuest. ”

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