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Collected and reviewed
Research and findings are processed, reviewed, and governed internally by Behind The 22.
Research Portal
A free, public research library.
The Behind The 22 Research Portal will let anyone search, analyze, visualize, and export published research data — so the evidence behind this work can be checked by anyone.
Opening later this month
How it works
Reviewed internally. Published openly.
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Published for free
Approved information is published to the free public Research Portal. External users can search, analyze, visualize, export, and perform their own research on published data.
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Protected from edits
External users can’t modify Behind The 22 research records, classifications, evidence relationships, or underlying data. Write access stays with authorized personnel.
What we’re researching
The operational issues behind the outcomes.
Our research keeps returning to one pattern: a real injury effect gets misread as something else — usually psychiatric — because the test, screening, or documentation step that would have caught the real cause never happened. The system is siloed enough that no one connects it.
Diagnosis and severity get miscoded
Vague diagnosis codes and a field severity score with known accuracy problems, with no standard process to correct the score later.
No comprehensive guideline for the hardest cases
The VA/DoD’s only TBI-specific clinical guideline covers mild TBI. Moderate and severe injuries have no equivalent.
Physiological causes missed, then read as psychiatric
Hormone and pituitary screening, autonomic dysfunction, medication burden, and environmental neurotoxicant exposure can each mimic or worsen injury effects.
Care organized by specialty, not by the person
Separate systems for brain injury and spinal cord injury, even though a person may need both.
Legal barriers to accountability
Federal rules that limit what courts can act on, sorting findings into what a court can address and what only Congress can fix.
Lessons from earlier generations
Long-term studies of Vietnam veterans, and research showing that timely, multi-disciplinary rehabilitation can reduce long-term costs.
Every finding traces back to a primary source — a government inspector general report, a court decision, a peer-reviewed study, or an agency’s own published policy. Nothing here is a claim about any individual person’s cause of injury, illness, or death. It’s a documented pattern across a large body of independently sourced evidence.
We also turn these patterns into root causes that can be fixed, and plan to share de-identified findings with oversight bodies through the Oversight Portal.
What we do with the patterns
From red flags to root causes.
Helping one person is only part of the job. When the same warning signs keep showing up in the de-identified data, we translate them into the specific root causes behind them — so what gets fixed is the problem itself, not just the symptom.
| Red flag we keep seeing | Root cause to target |
|---|---|
| A specialty referral was ordered but never completed. | Follow-through. No one is tracking referrals between specialties. |
| An injury or blast exposure drops out of later records. | Record continuity. The complete lifetime history doesn’t travel with the person. |
| Symptoms are attributed to PTSD before neurological causes are evaluated. | Evaluation order. Physiological causes need to be ruled in or out first. |
| Brain injury and spinal injury are handled in separate silos. | Care built around the specialty, not around the person. |
These are examples of the kinds of patterns we look for. What we find is shared, de-identified, with the people in a position to correct it — see the Oversight Portal.
What it will draw from
Public sources, organized and cross-referenced.
- Medical and scientific research papers
- Clinical practice guidelines
- VA, DoD, NIH, CDC, NIOSH, OSHA, and other government publications
- VA OIG, DoD OIG, and GAO reports
- Congressional reports and testimony
- Federal Register and regulatory publications
- Assessment tool documentation and validation studies
- Occupational exposure research
- Legal decisions and public administrative findings
- Consumer protection and regulatory enforcement information
Topics
What you’ll be able to explore.
A growing library
The portal will start small and grow as sources are added and reviewed. We’ll note what’s available as it expands.
Check our work
We want our research picked apart.
Every claim we make is built from public documentation and hard evidence, precisely so that anyone can check it. Found an error or a source we should look at? Tell us.