Stop the Shenanigans!

Saturday, August 25, 2007 | 2

By David DePaolo

The AMA Guides clearly state in the introduction that they are an impairment guideline and are to be used for the determination of compensation of the disabled. The editors of the Guides spend a lot of ink advising that their publication is inappropriate for determining how much money a person should receive for a disability because the Guides are to be used for determining how much impairment one should experience in the daily activities of life.

Yet we have one more state, South Carolina, that is going to implement the Guides for exactly what the editors of the Guides say should not be done.

So let's stop the shenanigans!

We now have a vast majority of states that have implemented the Guides for a purpose that they were expressly not intended -- the determination of compensation for disability in industrial settings.

It's time that someone, perhaps the AMA itself, write Industrial Disability Guidelines -- a set of universal guidelines specifically engineered to assist in the determination of compensation for disabilities that have resulted from industrial accidents.

We would then have a document that made some sense -- something that would readily translate in to a monetary factor for the compensation of disability.

Chapters on sexual dysfunction would disappear (except for Nevada) and chapters on work function impairment would be written.

Workers' compensation systems are relatively all the same, otherwise there would not be the clamoring to the Guides as the Bible of disability (even though they clearly state they are not to be used to determine disability). What this means is that there is universal need for a document that can be clearly adapted by states that was intended to deal with the unique challenges of determining how well someone may fit in to a work place of a job with a given disability that was compensated according to a universal code.

If the AMA doesn't do it (they frankly have no financial incentive -- even with the warning that their document is in appropriate for workers' compensation, more than 30 states now use it) then some other astute medical organization should.

ACOEM, are you listening?

David J. DePaolo is the president and CEO of WorkCompCentral.

-------------------

The views and opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of workcompcentral.com, its editors or management.