Article – ReedGroup Research Points to Over $6B in Avoidable Medical Costs

The research conducted by ReedGroup, involves analyzing how medical and pharmaceutical costs change over time during the course of an individual’s absence from work. Further they highlight that there is a direct link between incurred costs and the duration of an employee’s disability, with significant costs occurring even at later stages of the disability case. The analysis is based on a longitudinal database of more than 885,000 disability claims and 41 million healthcare records from employers and payers, associated with more than 1,400 unique diagnoses, over a 7-year period. This comprehensive database allowed researchers to build sophisticated models that considered important case characteristics such as severity of disease and history of past illness.