![]() Thus, maintaining readiness creates an incentive for the system to work as efficiently as possible. While these service members are being evaluated, they cannot deploy, which affects DoD's readiness to conduct its mission. At any given time, thousands of service members are in the IDES. Yet, at the same time, the complexity can have adverse consequences, leading to a lengthy evaluation process for members and extra time and resource costs to DoD. This complexity results from an effort to ensure that service members are given a complete and thorough evaluation for any potentially unfitting condition. The processes for determining fitness for duty and disability compensation are complex and involve numerous stakeholders in DoD and the VA. The IDES evaluates a service member's fitness for duty and determines disability benefits for those who are found unfit to continue serving and consequently medically discharged (see Figure 1). ![]() The current disability evaluation system is a joint program between DoD and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) called the Integrated Disability Evaluation System (IDES). Although prior proposals have introduced alternative approaches to compensating service members for disabilities, a rigorous evaluation of what those alternatives might look like, and their potential impact on service member benefits and costs to the Department of Defense (DoD), has never been conducted until now. Less attention has been paid to the method for calculating disability compensation. Over the years, the disability evaluation process has undergone many reforms to improve process efficiency. In these circumstances, a service member might be referred for disability evaluation to determine whether their medical condition allows them to return to duty or whether the condition is severe enough that the member is discharged from service and, in turn, paid disability compensation. Any alternative system should be evaluated not only on the basis of direct costs and benefits but also on whether it is consistent with the broader objective of disability compensation.Īs service members perform their jobs, occasions arise when they might face injury or illness that makes them unable to perform the duties required of their position.The estimated time savings associated with implementing an alternative system imply that active-duty end strength for the Army enlisted force would fall by at most 0.2 percent relative to the current system.Eliminating or delaying the rating step would reduce processing times under a FES by an average of 29 days relative to the current sequential process. ![]()
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