Findings from Center for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences in Insurance Companies Reported (Did implementation of no-fault auto-insurance in British Columbia, Canada, impact return to work following road trauma? Protocol for a before-after …): Insurance Companies

2023 OCT 05 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health & Medicine Business Daily -- New study results on insurance companies have been published. According to news reporting from Vancouver, Canada, by NewsRx journalists, research stated, “Road trauma (RT) is a major public health problem that often results in prolonged absenteeism from work. Limited evidence suggests that recovery after RT is associated with automobile insurance compensation schemes.”

Funders for this research include Insurance Corporation of British Columbia.

Our news reporters obtained a quote from the research from Center for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences: “In May 2021, British Columbia, Canada switched from fault-based to no-fault auto-insurance coverage. This manuscript presents the protocol for a planned evaluation of that natural experiment: We will evaluate the impact of changing automobile insurance schemes on return to work following RT.Methods and analysis The evaluation will use a before-after design to analyse auto-insurance claims (1 April 2019 to 30 April 2024) in order to compare recovery of claimants with non-catastrophic injuries who filed claims under the no-fault insurance scheme to that of those who filed claims under the previous system. Claimants will be followed from date of injury until they return to work or have been followed for 6 months (right-censored). We will perform sensitivity analyses to examine the robustness of our findings. First, we will exclude injuries that occurred during the COVID-19 provincial State of Emergency. Second, we will use propensity score methods rather than conventional covariate adjustment to address potential imbalance between characteristics of claimants pre-change and post-change. Finally, as the implementation effect may have a heterogeneous association with time off work, we will use quantile regression with right-censoring at 6 months to model differences in return to work at the 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles. Ethics and dissemination The study uses de-identified data and is approved by the University of British Columbia Clinical Research Ethics Board (H20-03644). This research is funded by the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC).”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Findings will be published in the peer-reviewed literature and summarised in a report prepared for ICBC. We anticipate that our findings will inform policy decisions in other jurisdictions considering switching to no-fault auto-insurance schemes.”

For more information on this research see: Did implementation of no-fault auto-insurance in British Columbia, Canada, impact return to work following road trauma? Protocol for a before-after survival analysis. BMJ Open, 2023,13(9). (BMJ Open - http://bmjopen.bmj.com/). The publisher for BMJ Open is BMJ Publishing Group.

A free version of this journal article is available at https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2023-075858.

Our news journalists report that more information may be obtained by contacting Mieke Koehoorn, Center for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Additional authors for this research include Christopher McLeod, Jeffrey R Brubacher, Shannon Erdelyi, Herbert Chan, Alex Jiang.

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