Deduplication: Streamlining Medical Record Reviews for Workers’ Compensation Claims

Due to the intricate nature of legal procedures involved in pursuing a workers’ compensation claim, injured workers often seek assistance from seasoned workers’ compensation attorneys to ensure a favourable outcome. Given that a workers’ compensation claim or lawsuit revolves around injuries or illnesses, medical records hold paramount importance. Attorneys representing injured workers rely on medical review solutions to thoroughly review these healthcare documents. During the review process, duplicate medical records can have several significant impacts, affecting the efficiency and effectiveness of the legal process. Medical records deduplication helps to identify and eliminate duplicate and invalid pages within a medical record. By streamlining the records and ensuring they are free from redundancy, reviewers can conduct a thorough and concise review, creating a comprehensive review report that offers clarity and valuable insights on workers’ compensation claims.

How Duplicate Medical Records Impacts Medical Record Review

• Reviewing duplicate medical records consumes additional time and resources for attorneys and legal staff.
• It can lead to longer review cycles and higher costs for the law firm and its clients.
• It can also complicate the organization and management of medical records, making it harder to locate and access relevant information efficiently.
• Sorting through duplicate records can distract legal professionals from focusing on critical details and essential information, resulting in the oversight of crucial evidence or key medical facts relevant to the case.
• It can even lead to confusion and ambiguity in understanding the medical history and treatment of the involved parties, impact the development of effective legal strategies, and weaken the case.

Advantages of Deduplication

Deduplication of medical records offers several advantages that can greatly benefit medical review processes. By removing duplicate entries and redundant information, unnecessary review expenses are reduced, optimizing resource allocation. The streamlined records maximize operational efficiency, allowing medical professionals to focus on critical aspects of the review. With a more concise and organized record set, the review process is expedited, leading to quicker case resolutions. Additionally, deduplication saves reviewers from drowning in excessive paperwork, enabling them to devote more time and attention to providing accurate and insightful assessments for clients. Medical record deduplication enhances the entire review workflow.

Deduplication Process Steps

• Data collection and preprocessing: Gather all the medical records related to a specific patient or case. This includes documents from various sources, such as hospitals, clinics, specialists, and diagnostic centers. Prepare the data for deduplication by converting documents into a structured format, such as text or PDF files. Standardizing the data format ensures consistency during the deduplication process.
• Data extraction and indexing: Extract relevant information from the medical records, such as patient names, medical IDs, dates, and other identifying details. This data will be used to compare and identify potential duplicates. Create a unique index for each medical record, allowing for quick identification and retrieval during the deduplication process.
• Comparison and duplicate identification: Compare the data within to identify potential duplicate records. Various algorithms and matching techniques are used to determine similarity and identify duplicates accurately. Evaluate the comparison results and flag potential duplicate records for further review.
• Removal of duplicate pages: Once potential duplicates are identified, the system reviews the content of each page within a record to identify and remove exact duplicates. This ensures that identical pages are eliminated from the final de-duplicated record.
• Formatting and organization: After removing duplicate pages, the medical records are formatted and organized to present a clean and coherent document. This step involves arranging the pages in chronological order, optimizing the records by creating borders and hyperlinks for swift access to each category, and making the records easier to read and interpret.

Law firms can consider partnering with a medical record review company to regularly perform data deduplication processes to remove duplicate records from the legal database and ensure data integrity. When choosing a medical record review company, law firms should carefully consider several key factors such as – the company’s experience and expertise, services of qualified experts on the team, use of advanced technology, data security and compliance, and turnaround time.