Mass tort cases involve a group of plaintiffs who are affected by the same harm caused by the actions of the defendant, directly or indirectly. One or more defendants may be involved in these cases that are typically caused by medical devices, toxic contamination, pharmaceutical drugs, and so on. Mass tort cases involve reviewing voluminous medical records, which makes the review process challenging and therefore attorneys prefer to utilize reliable medical review services for this purpose.
Medical Review Services for Mass Tort Lawyers
Medical records retrieval, medical record organization, reviewing and summarizing the medical chart of large plaintiff groups can be tedious and time-consuming. Moreover, when the review process is done in-house, you need to manage all these records, which requires scanning the records for electronic delivery and storage. This is where a professional medical record review company can assist mass tort attorneys with the following services.
- Collecting and organizing the medical records
- Bookmarking and highlighting the records
- Reviewing the medical records
- Evaluating the severity of the injury
- Describing the standard of care
- Preparing the medical case chronology
- Determining case merit and providing an evaluation
- Summarizing the key points on the injuries and harm caused by the defective product or drug
Attorneys can request medical record review at any stage of the litigation. The partnering medical review firm works closely with them to identify the particular information required to develop a successful claim. Based on individual attorney requirements, the medical records can be highlighted, and the data can be presented in a report format with hyperlinks to specific records as required. Details highlighted include patient demographics, defective product ID, medical procedures, significant procedures and surgeries, related to the relevant product.
Advantages of Professional Medical Review Services
Professional medical reviewers, unlike a legal team untrained in medicine, understand the need to build a good chronology to establish a plaintiff’s use of the product or drug and the ensuing injury.
- It enables lawyers to identify the most significant medical records that clearly prove the evolution of the medical claim, right from the first use of the product/drug, the appearance of symptoms/illnesses to the diagnosis and medical treatments provided.
- The record review results are presented in the required format – as marked-up medical records or a particular format such as a plaintiff fact sheet.
- Also, the medical chronologies can be customized either as an outline of the treatment provided for a specific injury, or as a detailed narrative to provide a more customized report of the plaintiff’s experience.
- Any missing information is identified so that the missing medical records can be obtained as early as possible.
Considering the large number of plaintiffs involved in mass tort litigation and the severity of the injuries that may involve treatment by multiple physicians at multiple locations, the medical record retrieval and review process may be complicated. It is labor- as well as time-intensive.
When the medical review process is outsourced, law firms can focus on their important case-associated tasks. Attorneys can evaluate the scope of the case, evaluate the value of the case, and allocate settlement proceeds. They can prepare and litigate the case efficiently and win the case, and ensure a satisfactory resolution for the clients. Since the medical review team has the required expertise in medical-legal documentation, they can extract the valuable pieces of information from the medical records quickly and efficiently. With this information, the attorney can identify can identify similar or identical injuries in all the plaintiffs.
With a reliable medical review firm to support them, attorneys can save the strain of reviewing the obscure medical records, and also save valuable time and costs. A professionally prepared medical case summary helps them clearly establish the association between the usage of the product and the damages incurred. The details related to the product are included along with the damages, which helps decide the strength of the case.
