How are medical records used in personal injury claims?
Transcript:
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medical records play such a huge role in injury claims. Um and it doesn’t matter what the type of case is. Um you know certainly the number of medical providers or the number of individual clinics, doctors, physical therapists, etc. that anybody sees will drive kind of how a case goes. But at the end of the day, what it comes down to is this. What we found and I think what all the studies show is is that if you end up in a trial and your client says X but the records say Y, more often than not the
00:00:32
jury is going to go with what the records say over what the individual says. So the records play such an integral role of telling the story of injuries, treatment, recovery, and so forth. But the bigger thing too is making sure clients get the right treatment, get to the right people, get to the right specialists, make sure that they’re truthful, make sure that they’re accurate, make sure that they’re thorough. A lot of times clients will have what we call a gap in care where maybe they’re
00:01:05
treating for a period of time and then they don’t get any treatment for a period of time, you know, trying to figure out why. Um but the records because of the significance that juries, insurance companies and so forth put on them. It’s important not only that individuals tell everything going on to the provider and are prepared and understand that so that they do that. One of the things we always try to do if somebody’s going to see a new specialist, it’s try to educate them on
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the significance of making sure that they tell them everything. So, I had a client even recently that was going to see a doctor and she’d been having ongoing numbness in her hand, one of her fingers after a neck surgery where she had radiating pain and and a ner a disc injury. And she asked a question of me. She’s like, “Well, should I tell him that my hands still numb?” Of course. So sometimes even things that seem very logical and things that we would always expect the client to to say they for
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maybe they’re stoic, maybe they maybe they just for whatever reason don’t see the significance of it. Don’t tell the provider. But it’s so important that people are truthful, people are thorough, people are honest, people give all the information and get it out there because at the end of the day, when the jury goes back to deliberate in a case, they’re going to look at those records, they’re going to study those records, they’re going to figure out what’s in those records. So along those same
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lines, it’s also important that we have them all. We go through them all and we know what’s there too. So that there are things in the records that need to be discussed, maybe corrected, set straight. We can try to do that through the client through testimony and just making sure that the story that’s being told in full, whether it’s the client or the records or the everything put together is accurate and true. And those records are such an integral part of that that we have to we got to get them
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and we got to know what’s there.
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