A 21st Century System for Evaluating Veterans for Disability Benefits

by Institute of Medicine, Board on Military and Veterans Health, Committee on Medical Evaluation of Veterans for Disability Compensation

21st Century System for Evaluating Veterans' Disability Benefits recommends improvements in the medical evaluation and rating of veterans for the benefits provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to compensate for illnesses or injuries incurred in or aggravated by military service. Compensation is a monthly cash benefit based on a rating schedule that determines the degree of disability on a scale of 0 to 100. Although a disability rating may also entitle a veteran to ancillary services, such as vocational rehabilitation and employment services, the rating schedule is out of date medically and contains ambiguous criteria and obsolete conditions and language. The current rating schedule emphasizes impairment and limitations or loss of specific body structures and functions which may not predict disability well. 21st Century System for Evaluating Veterans' Disability Benefits recommends that this schedule could be revised to include modern concepts of disability including work disability, nonwork disability, and quality of life. In addition to the need for an updated rating schedule, this book highlights the need for the Department of Veterans' Affairs to devote additional resources to systematic analysis of how well it is providing services or how much the lives of veterans are being improved, as well as the need for a program of research oriented toward understanding and improving the effectiveness of its benefits programs.

406 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2007

About the author

The National Academy of Medicine (NAM, formerly the Institute of Medicine-IOM) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Medicine is a part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the National Research Council (NRC).

The National Academy of Medicine provides national advice on issues relating to biomedical science, medicine, and health, and serves as an adviser to the nation to improve health aims to provide unbiased, evidence-based, and authoritative information and advice concerning health and science policy to policy-makers, professionals, leaders in every sector of society, and the public at large.

Operating outside the framework of the U.S. federal government, it relies on a volunteer workforce of scientists and other experts, operating under a formal peer-review system. As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and continuing achievements in a relevant field as well as for their willingness to participate actively.