The Medical Disability Advisor: Workplace Guidelines for Disability Duration

The Medical Disability Advisor, Fourth Edition, was written precisely for this purpose: getting disabled employees back to work in good health and on time. This reference work quickly emerged as the industry standard. Today, thousands of human resource professionals, insurance companies, doctors and nurses use its helpful guidelines and duration timetables. Ten years ago, Reed Group, Ltd. combined the finest medical research with an easy-to-understand communications style to create a revolutionary resource, The Medical Disability Advisor, First Edition—also known as "the Guidelines." Updating this hardback about every three years, Reed Group recently completed the most significant upgrade in the publication's history: The Medical Disability Advisor, Fourth Edition. This book offers a plenitude of information for getting disabled employees back to work at the appropriate time. Nicely organized, it describes over 1,000 medical conditions and procedures that may affect the working population. The book illustrates its information with colored drawings, tables, and graphs. The text provides clearly formatted subtopics in a predictable order, to aid the user in locating information quickly. The Medical Disability Advisor provides "durations" (numbers of days a given disability will generally last for a given job classification) and "explanations" that make those disability durations applicable to the individual employee. Both the durations and the explanations result from medical and statistical research. Under the expertise of the Medical Advisory Board, they are continually refined with each edition, and they are keyed to ICD-9 CM codes. The Medical Disability Advisor "durations" result from evidence-based medicine practiced at its best intentions. Individual clinical expertise is weighed against clinical data in order to provide the most accurate treatment or recommendation regarding each particular case. The medical expertise allows an intelligent use of data that takes into account the impurities and selection biases inherent in any purely quantitative study. The data, similarly, alerts the individual expert of phenomena that his or her personal experience has not encountered. The result is a balanced, rational, and humane tool for managing a multitude of disability cases as consistently and personally as possible. The latest edition takes advantage of new information about conditions such as fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, complex regional pain syndrome, depression and other complex medical issues. It now includes guidance regarding alternative and complementary therapies as well as a host of other factors that affect disability duration. The duration tables, themselves reviewed and modified, have already been reported by several companies to further reduce company expenditures related to employee absence. The Medical Disability Advisor's most vital role is to provide a framework for non-adversarial communication among interested parties: • employees • employers • case managers • benefits administrators • labor organizations • workers' compensation • health care providers • insurance companies Primarily intended for those involved in managing medical disabilities, The Medical Disability Advisor is useful as a desk reference work that explains many medical conditions in ordinary English (with technical terms in parentheses).