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Contact Information

If you have comments regarding any documents on WC's website or need an alternate format, you may contact us via email at: dwddwc@dwd.wisconsin.gov

Or you can reach us by phone at: (608) 266-1340

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Research Statistics

Overview

Worker's Compensation provides data in order to facilitate a variety of research, resulting in statistical information on workers injuries, illnesses and fatalities. This research is used in a myriad of ways by various audiences, including State and Federal agencies.

Partnership with Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene

The WC Division has partnered with the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene since 2009, and the Division of Public Health Informatics and Surveillance, in order to produce new Annual Reports on Injury and Illness Claims. Using data provided by the WC Division, these new reports present detailed information on the nature and types of injuries and illnesses for compensable claims by year of injury, starting with 2006. They summarize indemnity due (average, minimum, median and maximum) broken out by gender, body part, cause of injury, nature of injury and county where the injury occurred. The reports do not include claims marked as denied, under investigation, non-compensable or no lost time, but they do include closed claims and claims that were either litigated at one time or in litigation when the reports were run. An exciting addition is the break out of injury and illness claims by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes.

Notes on data in general:

The WC Division started accepting First Reports of Injury (FROI) via our Electronic Data Interchange program on October 30th, 1997, and then via our Pending Reports Internet application on October 25th, 2001. Starting September 1st, 2005 FROIs were required to be reported to us electronically via either method. It should be noted that for electronically reported FROIs the codes for gender, body part, cause of injury, nature of injury and county where injury occurred are accepted into our database as they are sent to us, without any vetting or accuracy examination by WC staff.

Notes on Hygiene Lab reports:

The codes themselves have been given a rudimentary analysis on their validity by comparisons of the distribution of the number of claims by category with Bureau of Labor Statistics--Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illness data. All categories, except Unknown, with ten cases or less have been suppressed for confidentiality reasons. The reports were run off of a dataset given to the Hygiene Lab by the WC Division in early October 2008, and therefore reflect the state of WC databases at that time.

Hygiene Lab Annual Reports on Injury and Illness Claims - Year of Injury

By gender, body part, cause of injury, nature of injury and county code:

By NAICS code:

WC Division Annual Report on Injury and Illness Claims--Year of Injury (historic)

The reports below were run on January 1st 2008 and will not be run again, therefore reflecting a snapshot of the WC Division database on December 31st 2008.  The reports below do not count claims that were either litigated at one time or in litigation when they were run.

Injuries within the Calendar Year: (year of the injury)

Occupational Injuries & Illnesses and Fatalities

Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII)

These reports provide statistical information on work related injuries and illnesses (excluding first aid) collected from employers OSHA and Worker's Compensation records.

Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI)

These reports are a complete study of work related fatalities that occurred in Wisconsin regardless of coverage by OSHA or Worker's Compensation using a wide variety of reports (death certs., WC, Coroners/Medical Examiners, OSHA, etc.) .

Other Research Related Links

The Workers Compensation Research Institute is an independent, not-for-profit research organization providing high-quality, objective information about public policy issues involving worker's compensation systems. The WCRI has completed several studies on the Wisconsin Worker's Compensation System.