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.