Challenges of Medical Record Review & Options to overcome them…

by Shally Warner Owner

A common component of every single case that goes to a Personal Injury Lawyer is a thorough review of the medical and surgical treatment and investigative procedures that a plaintiff has been subjected to. In order to develop an understanding of the case in hand, an attorney is required to go through all the medical and surgical records procured from various hospitals, medical treatment providers, ambulance service, diagnostic facilities, pharmacies etc. These medical records are hard to retrieve, but even harder to review. A comprehensive medical record review is the key to effective evaluation and planning for the case which in turn plays a vital role in winning one.

With every personal injury, premises liability, medical malpractice, mass torts, dog bites, or nursing home neglect cases, dealing with large volumes of unorganized medical records post certain challenges for a lawyer. Let’s review some of these challenges:

High Volumes – With most of the cases, especially the ones with hospital admissions and surgical procedures, these medical records run into hundreds and thousands of pages which would mean several PDFs or image files to deal with.

Time Consuming – Higher volumes of these medical records is always translates into more time being spent by the internal resources in handling them.

Redundant Information – With records coming form several medical treatment providers and diagnostic facilities at different/multiple times, one has to deal with duplicate records, unrelated records, records prior to date the date of incident, etc.

Unorganized Records – Getting unorganized (not chronologically sorted) records from the provider is quite common.

Missing Records & Bills – Finding these missing records and bills either for specific dates or for an entire provider is imperative to preparing future course of a case, be it for a settlement demand letter or planning a litigation recourse.

Difficult to Interpret – With different medical provider using their own customary formats for preparing these records, deciphering them posts yet another challenge.

Seeking ways to overcome all the above mentioned challenges is an essential component affecting the chances of winning a case, either by way of an out-of-court settlement or through a trial. An effective medical record review of a case is an essential and unavoidable task. An attorney’s options for dealing with this is to either utilize the in-house team of paralegals or clerks OR to seek support from an experienced medical record review services provider.

Using the in-house team for performing record review would not only mean higher personnel, management and administrative costs, but would also mean diverting your resources from the core focus area of your business. Partnering with a medical records review company in such a case, seems like a smarter choice that comes with following advantages: