IOH Research Institute
Advancing Recovery Through Evidence-Based Research
About the IOH Research Institute
The IOH Research Institute is a translational research center dedicated to advancing recovery and strengthening the foundational promise of workers’ compensation. Embedded within real-world workers’ compensation environments, the Institute studies how clinical care, claims practices, organizational decisions, and system design interact to influence outcomes, particularly in complex or delayed-recovery cases.
Grounded in data from injured employees who have participated in IOH evidence-based treatment programs, IOH Research translates real-world evidence into practical insight. Its work helps clinicians, claims professionals, employers, and policymakers better understand how timing, care sequencing, and coordination shape recovery, disability duration, and long-term system sustainability.
Why This Research Matters
Workers’ compensation was built on the Grand Bargain, a promise of timely care and recovery for injured employees in exchange for predictability and protection for employers. Today, a small percentage of claims drive a disproportionate share of chronicity, disability, and long-term cost. IOH Research shows that many of these outcomes are system-driven, shaped by delays, fragmented care, outdated assumptions, and misaligned incentives and decision-making. By identifying where recovery trajectories break down, this research supports earlier intervention, better coordination, and more effective paths back to function.
Patients with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) frequently experience chronic pain. [1, 2] Chronic pain may cause disability, as it can impede patients’ abilities to perform activities of daily living. [3] As both psychosocial and physical factors may hamper TBI recovery, a transdisciplinary occupational medicine program helps patients with deficits due to TBI reduce their degree of disability using a biopsychosocial therapeutic community approach. This approach may improve patients’ health along multiple dimensions concurrently, addressing issues such as disability, anxiety, depression, and pain catastrophizing.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an occupational hazard for first responders. More first responders die from suicide than in the line of duty. Although PTSD has often been considered incurable, an occupational medicine program utilizing a biopsychosocial approach to treatment has shown promise in reversing it. This analysis aims to determine whether greater intensity of participation in an evidence-based biopsychosocial program is associated with an increased likelihood of clinical resolution of PTSD in a population of first responders. Additionally, the analysis explores whether the intensity of program participation is linked to the likelihood that participating first responders will return to work.
An occupational medicine clinic’s functional restoration program, using a transdisciplinary biopsychosocial approach, helps patients improve physical functionality. As a byproduct of doing so, it may address chronic pain and improve other behavioral health areas. Chronic pain often coexists with other behavioral health conditions. [1-2]
First responders face trauma at work, which may lead to anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). An occupational medicine program using a transdisciplinary biopsychosocial treatment approach aims to reduce anxiety in first responders with both anxiety and PTSD. This analysis examines how the intensity of patient participation in the program relates to the likelihood of anxiety resolving, as measured by the clinician-administered Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAM-A).
