Organizing medical records in client files is crucial. This is vital in management of the records for both pre-litigation settlement process and trial preparations. It is possible to mark the entire record as an exhibit and drill down to certain pages, or even paragraphs, as exhibits or even sub-exhibits in their own right.
Everyone in the firm who accesses the files should be able to find specific medical records easily and quickly. While reviewing and summarizing medical documentation, we also pay close attention to references to prior and/or unrelated medical treatment and procedures. We include information regarding prior medical treatment at the beginning of the medical summary.
Knowing how to do medical summarization is important, and is also popularly referred to as medical chronology or medical timelines or medical record review. The nomenclature varies, but the essence of the activity remains core to the central theme of providing fair medical overview to the law firm. Medical records are the ‘great equalizer’ in the pre-litigation settlement process and of penultimate value at trials.
Uses of medical summaries:
- Case overview, determining the extent of injury and assessing claim
- Preparing and identifying exhibits
- Response to interrogatories
- Determine if the plaintiff has unrelated medical conditions which need to be factored into a determination of his earning expectancy for settlement purposes
- Preparing the plaintiff to testify at a hearing or deposition
- To provide review of records for expert opinion (for example: Independent Medical Examination and Work Capacity Evaluation)
- Unearthing mitigating factors
Our Capability:
- Study and validate the nature of the injury and/or illness
- Substantiate the symptoms, treatment and prognosis of the injury and/or illness based on the records available
- Summarize the general causes of the injury and/or illness
- Inform the firm about medical terms, tests and procedures
- Obtain copies of medical and scholarly research articles
- Locate expert witness in the subject medical specialty
- Obtain basic illustrations and diagrams of standard injuries and/or conditions
- Medical Records re-organization with bates stamping, bookmarking, indexing, and hyperlinking
- Annotated medical summary
- SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan) format general medical summary (tabular form) with synopsis for personal injury cases like motor vehicle accidents, slip &fall, dog bite, premises liability, workers compensation, social security disability, veteran’s affairs, and sexual assault
- Narrative medical summary
- Medical part of expert disclosures and demand letter
- Customized medical summary with Standard of Care Analysis for medical malpractice cases (example: nursing home abuse, pressure sore, frequent fall in care facility, wrongful death, and obstetrics and gynaecology)
- Medical Tab Update and Medical Summary in case management tools such as Lawex Corp’s TrialWorks, Needles, Lexis Nexis’ Time Matters and Case Maps, Aderant Total Office (formerly Client Profiles)
- Itemized medical billing summaries
- Privilege log for medical records with redaction of issues relating to patient’s privacy and confidentiality, and physician-patient privilege
- Summarization of patient’s journal/personal diary
- Medical summary and analysis of claim from defendant’s perspective
- Medical documentation and research to aid personal injury cases
Benefits:
- The ability to free up in-house paralegals and attorneys to focus on core professional commitments
- Improved processes and efficiencies to decrease case life cycles and increase law firms’ bandwidth to take up more cases
- Improve efficiency and turn-around time for law firms and ensure long term cost reductions
- Easy referencing and effortless navigation via hyper-linking between summary and source
The Exigent difference:
- Deployment of doctors, paramedics and medico legal personnel to provide fair and informed synopsis to enable game changing settlements
- Technical and administrative support to optimize efficiency
- Skilful deployment of appropriate personnel for knowledge management and compliance tasks
- Ability to manage scale for large projects or short term assignments
- Option of dedicated team members for ongoing support to create an extension of your in-house team
- Multi-shore capabilities for flexibility with timelines and specialized expertise
- Overnight service return for time sensitive projects (based on time zone)
- In-depth medical domain expertise
- Unparalleled commercial intelligence support
