Some injuries heal. Others leave something behind — a knee that will never bend the same way, a shoulder that aches through every shift, a back that limits what you can lift for the rest of your working life. Permanent partial disability compensates that residual damage, even when you are back at work.
The award is driven almost entirely by one medical exam and the percentage that comes out of it. Get that number wrong and you are paid for a fraction of what you lost. Call (614) 221-7381 before you accept an order.
What Permanent Partial Disability Is
PPD is a payment for permanent impairment resulting from the conditions allowed in your claim. It is not wage replacement. It does not require you to be off work. It is the system's way of putting a number on damage that is not going to improve.
Ohio handles it in two ways. Most claims go through a percentage award: a physician examines you, assigns a whole-person impairment percentage, and that percentage converts into weeks of compensation. Certain injuries instead fall under the scheduled-loss statute, which pays a fixed number of weeks for the loss or loss of use of a specific body part regardless of percentage. We cover those figures on our Ohio settlement and PPD chart page.
Who Qualifies
You qualify if your claim is allowed, your allowed conditions have reached a permanent state, and enough time has passed since the injury or the last payment of compensation for the application to be considered. You do not need to be disabled from work. You do not need to have been off work at all in some cases.
What you do need is every condition properly allowed in the claim before you are examined. The examining physician rates what is in the claim and nothing else. If the psychological condition, the aggravated arthritis, or the second body part was never added, none of it counts toward your percentage — and refiling later does not undo an exam that was done on an incomplete claim.
How the Award Is Calculated
You file the C-92 application. The BWC schedules you with an examining physician, usually one you have never met, who evaluates you against published impairment guidelines and reports a percentage. The BWC then issues a tentative order: the percentage, and the money it converts into.
The conversion is mechanical — each percentage point equals a set number of weeks of compensation, paid at a statutory PPD rate rather than your full wage rate. So the percentage is everything. A difference between eight percent and eighteen percent is not a rounding error; it is thousands of dollars.
If you disagree with the tentative order, you object, and the question goes to a District Hearing Officer who can consider a competing report from a physician of your choosing.
Common Fights We See
A rushed exam. Fifteen minutes, a few range-of-motion measurements, no real history taken. The report reads like a form because it is one. A treating physician who has managed your care for two years sees a very different picture.
Conditions left out. The rating covers only allowed conditions. Missing allowances are the most expensive mistake in PPD practice.
Pre-existing apportionment. The examiner attributes most of your impairment to arthritis or age rather than the injury, cutting the percentage. Whether the injury substantially aggravated a pre-existing condition is a medical argument worth having.
Accepting the first order. Once you take the tentative award, that percentage stands until you can prove your condition objectively worsened.
How We Help
Before you are ever examined, we audit the claim for missing allowances and file what needs to be added. We tell you what the examiner will ask and what the exam actually measures, so you describe your limitations accurately instead of toughing it out for twenty minutes and being rated on that performance.
When an order comes back low, we object, obtain an independent evaluation, and argue the difference at hearing. We also look at whether an increase application makes sense for an old award, and whether the claim is a candidate for settlement at all.
Bring us the order and the exam report. Our Columbus workers' compensation attorneys will read them at no charge and tell you plainly whether the number is defensible. If the underlying claim or a condition was denied outright, start with our guide to a denied Ohio workers' comp claim.