Attorneys and law firms dealing with diverse medico-legal cases require properly organized and summarized documents. Any lawsuit involves research and documentation from the initial stage itself. To understand the medical facts related to the lawsuit or to find crucial evidence, they need to review the medical records and clearly understand the content. While dealing with complex medical records, attorneys need litigation support from professionals. Medical review solutions constitute an important litigation support service for law firms handling a large number of plaintiffs and cases.
Litigation support refers to services that support attorneys in building the case they handle such as maintaining databases, reviewing documents, retrieving records, organizing them and developing trial presentation materials, among others.
Proper medical record analysis is critical to support law firms with all the important information needed for the case. Attorneys can outsource tasks such as legal drafting, medical claims review, deposition summaries, legal rebuttals, medical record analysis, and record summary preparation so that such processes are efficiently managed by an experienced and skilled team with complete security, compliance and confidentiality.
Medico-legal support services for lawyers include
- Medical Case Screening
Every medico-legal case has some strong and weak points. Analyzing the case in detail will help reveal its strengths and weaknesses, and thus attorneys can choose cases that can be pursued in the shortest possible time. Written affidavits and reports also help to validate the merit of a case. Lawyers can also determine the right approach to present the case in a court of law.
- Medical Record Review
Medical records and accurate review of those records are important while developing any case, let that be personal injury, medical malpractice, workers’ compensation or any other. Getting the records thoroughly analyzed by a professional medical record reviewer helps attorneys to successfully develop and argue their case.
- Preparation of Medical Records Summary
Most lawsuits require a medical record summary. Creating summaries of voluminous medical records that explain the nature of the injury, past medical history etc. is time-consuming for attorneys and their legal teams. Medical summary preparation involves analyzing voluminous medical charts, categorizing them based on service providers, medical history, observations, diagnosis, prescribed treatments or any other preferred category, indexing records chronologically by date in forward or in reverse order, and hyperlinking the source records. Preparing an error-free medical record summary requires years of experience and minute attention to detail. Professional medical record summarizers can generate simple and precise summaries that would help attorneys easily understand the crucial medical facts related to the case.
- Deposition Summary Preparation
Deposition testimony of the defendants and their witnesses is important for lawyers to prove the case, and determine the prospects for settlement or trial. The time to complete depositions depends on the number of witnesses to be deposed. A deposition summary has to be objective or impartial, without any personal recommendations on the part of the summarizer. It must clearly communicate the key points covered in the full deposition transcript. Preparing a witness’ deposition summary requires extensive experience in the litigation field and exceptional writing skills.
- Organization of Medical Records
Medical records obtained from providers across diverse medical facilities are mostly voluminous and may also be disorganized and confusing. Proper medical record organization helps identify any missing or duplicate records, or inconsistencies and makes medical record analysis more efficient and easier for law firms. The organization process involves diverse steps such as unitization, consolidation, coding and indexing, categorization, medical record sorting, bookmarking and hyperlinking, OCR, and more.
- Plaintiff Fact Sheet Preparation
Plaintiff fact sheet is a key document in a medico-legal case that provides both plaintiff and defense sides an overview of the case and helps understand its strengths and weaknesses. Plaintiff fact sheets help attorneys to review the case thoroughly before preparing the case.
- Legal Drafting
Legal drafting and documentation include different steps such as preparing trial briefs, document preparation for court procedures, organizing reports and affidavits, legal depositions, and more. Outsourcing the task will free up the law firm staff for more focused concerns.
Comprehensive Drafting
Understanding a medical case from the medical perspective and presenting it from a legal perspective are two different ball games altogether. However, our expertise in drafting the summary helps in meeting a common ground. We have experts to make the drafting comprehensive and easy-to-understand.
Medical review solutions are a vital part of medico-legal support services. By outsourcing the medico-legal tasks to third-party vendors specialized in reviewing and analyzing medical records for lawsuits, attorneys can ease up all the processes at the same time. While outsourcing document preparation- and litigation-related tasks, make sure that the provider has an experienced team of medical and legal professionals as well as a managerial team to quickly complete the assigned tasks.
