Medical Records Review is a fundamental activity in personal injury, medical malpractice, mass torts, and workers’ compensation cases. A process for reviewing medical records is essential when creating a case plan, constructing a demand letter, or even as a consulting legal expert. Nevertheless, even with the provision of medical record retrieval services and other technological aids, delays seem inevitable.
This post will identify the five primary causes of medical records review delays and discuss how to alleviate or eliminate them through intelligent methods and advanced technology.
1. Complexity and Size of Medical Records
The collection of medical records relating to a given issue may run into hundreds or even thousands of pages in chronic or complex cases with multiple hospital visits, surgeries, and specialists. Given the myriad diagnostic and treatment procedures carried out, a lot of time is consumed in piecing together a chronological timeline of the claim.
Moreover, stalling progress is the intricate medical phrases, abbreviations, and inconsistencies from different providers’ documentation. Clinical expertise shall be best positioned to fill in gaps that cannot be salvaged, and there lay the danger of critical pieces of information being misrepresented and, in the direst circumstances, misrepresented entirely.
2. Technical and Processing Challenges in Testing
Medical information is composed of laboratory results, imaging studies, and pathology reports. Expert time evaluation should include examination of the legal relevance for technical tests. Moreover, numerous reports are concealed within scans, creating a barrier for extraction from medical files.
Patient cases that include handwritten notes, illegible handwriting, or dubious patient files with medication order errors require more exhaustive scrutiny and interlinking of files to cross-check information.
3. Additional Analysis and Expert Consultations
Not every record is self-explanatory. Some need advanced insights derived from file examinations by medical doctors or legal nurse practitioners. In cases where the medical chart contains intricate procedures or surgeries, higher amounts of data pertain to some additional medical information assessments.
The procurement of second opinions or expert declarations takes considerable time, especially when they must incorporate additional clinical knowledge or undertake a literature review. Additionally, collaborating with external experts introduces the reliance on third-party timelines, which creates bottlenecks.
4. Electronic Health Record (EHR) System Limitations
Although having a digital copy of health records improves accessibility, it comes with its problems. Differences in formats, system compatibilities, and a lack of metadata all lead to inaccuracies with inconsistencies containing missing information.
Additionally, medical records that are outdated may be kept on different systems or even in offline paper storage. The absence of a uniform template increases the difficulty of constructing a timeline, which is vital to forming a comprehensive legal argument.
5. Administrative and Coordination Delays
The reviewing of a medical record for a claim takes time because of the administrative hurdles posed by waiting for the retrieval of said record from the associated storage services, the inter-hospital coordination, or complicated HIPAA compliance policies.
Another set of issues arises when legal support staff become overwhelmed, or the proper artificial intelligence tools purportedly aimed at enhancing efficiency within medical record review are not available. Searching for incomplete medical files, evaluating protracted durations of hospitalization, and integrating them into a claim timeline are tasks that become rewarding.
How to Avoid or Mitigate Delays in Medical Record Review?
Everyone within a law firm and other legal practitioners can minimize the delays occurring in the process of reviewing medical records by following the steps highlighted below:
1. Partner with Medical Review Experts
Employ specialists in medical record review and medicine to work on difficult paperwork, analyze data, and pinpoint problems with charts at an early stage.
2. Leverage Artificial Intelligence Tools
Employ AI technologies designed for medical record review to automate the data extraction process, page counting, and arrangement of files into a linear timeframe.
3. Standardize the Review Process
Provide templates alongside their SOPs to allow legal personnel incoming files in an organized fashion that promotes information prioritization, manual error reduction, and information retrieval.
4. Use Reliable Record Retrieval Services
Obtain aid from professional medical record retrieval services that provide relevant records for set deadlines and constantly follow up with the relevant institutions to ease delay bottlenecks.
5. Maintain a Centralized Document Hub
All electronic copies of records must be stored in a secure location for real-time updating, which helps prevent version disputes, duplication, and ensures that attorneys operate on current medical records.
Conclusion
Concerning personal injury and malpractice cases, the delay in a medical record review can negatively impact a review’s efficiency and outcome. Increasing case complexity, large volumes of medical records, and emerging challenges with EHR systems require legal practitioners to be more proactive.
Law firms stand to benefit from cooperating with reliable partners and integrating intelligence systems to sift through medical data. This, and hiring skilled reviewers, enables improved realization of set objectives, optimally meeting the set goals, and serving the client more efficiently.
Need Expert Medical Record Review Services?
MRR Health Tech specializes in the most accurate, detailed, and time-bound medical chart reviews for personal injury, mass tort, and medical malpractice cases. Our services simplify workflows through expert summaries, organization, record retrieval, and more.
