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Research released last month shows that food industry worker injury and fatality rates increased at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, triggering regulators to focus on historical problems in food production safety. While pandemic-related pressures on food manufacturing and distribution caused injury rates and fatalities to rise problems existed before COVID-19 hit, the authors of the six-year study said. The…

Vertical integration in medicine is driving up patient care pricing in workers compensation, and provider consolidation is not necessarily translating to improvements in patient outcomes, according to research from the Workers Compensation Research Institute. The study released Thursday, Impact of Medical Provider Consolidation on Workers’ Compensation Payments, examined the impact of provider vertical integration on comp payments, showing how doctor…

A former employee of Feed Products and Service filed a wrongful termination lawsuit, claiming he was fired for seeking worker's compensation benefits. Plaintiff Thomas Seehausen filed the lawsuit in the Madison County Circuit Court against Feed Products South, Inc., doing business as Feed Products and Service, Co., citing breach of contract, slander, disparate treatment and retaliatory discharge. According to the…

Injured workers self-reporting anxiety and depression increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with numbers jumping “significantly” between 2019 and 2020 and not returning to pre-pandemic rates in 2022 as the pandemic waned, according to an industry trends report released Tuesday by Medrisk Inc. In 2019, 24.4% of injured workers reported they had anxiety, 19.8% reported depression and 14.8…

Less coordination of care was found to be a factor in injured workers who relied on “extended” physical rehabilitation post-injury, according to a study released Wednesday by the Workers Compensation Research Institute. According to WCRI, physical medicine services are commonly used in treating workers with lower back pain and other musculoskeletal injuries, and in recent years, there has been an…