Lawyers get to deal with medical records when they handle medical lawsuits, such as insurance claims, workers’ compensation, medical malpractice, and other personal injury cases.
From retrieving to review through to submitting these records, the entire process often becomes tedious and laborious. Not only is it costly, but it also requires several working hours to prepare and submit requests. Moreover, these documents typically contain clients’ sensitive data that lawyers must protect from any potential risks.
Besides these, a lawyer handling medical records usually faces a variety of challenges. To efficiently meet these challenges, most lawyers and law firms build their own solutions, with many relying upon external medical record review services, which has been one of the smartest ways to prepare for the case at hand.
In this piece of writing, we will discuss the challenges lawyers face while managing medical records, helping you become aware of them and their solutions.
Lawyers’ 6 Most Significant Challenges with Medical Records & Their Solutions
Challenge: 1 – Lack of Uniformity in Records’ Formats
HIPPA guidelines standardize the security and privacy measures that lawyers need to stick to in order to protect medical records. However, there’s no such legislation for these records’ format and presentation, causing a lack of uniformity in records from medical providers/facilities across the sector.
This usually comes up as a big challenge because lawyers need to address and rectify discrepancies, putting together the events described in diversified medical records of the patient.
Solution
One solution that you can consider to make your life as a lawyer easier is to hire external firms. That can help you by providing a transcript of complicated, unclear records and verifying their precision. This way, you get access to professionals with vast experience in identifying patterns in records from various medical service providers.
Challenge: 2 – Not Getting Precise Information in One Go
Always have a solid approach for requesting medical records; otherwise, you might end up receiving documents having incomplete information or complete information in an illegible manner.
In addition, it can take several hours to spot and resolve inconsistencies in information captured, resulting in an increased amount of time and money spent on case preparation.
For example, you may receive an authentic copy of a patient’s medical record. Still, it can turn out to be incomplete due to missing vital notes or some crucial elements not being disclosed to protect the patient’s privacy. You would need to ensure that the certified copy clearly tells exactly what the original document does.
Solution
Outsourcing to a reliable partner offering effective medical record retrieval services can be a sound decision. A legal professional specializing in healthcare can determine missing elements or other issues on a given record and notify you about the same. Furthermore, on your behalf, they can contact the provider to get things sorted, without adding any extra service charges.
Challenge: 3 – The More the Discrepancies, The Less the Valuable Insights
Whether due to the lack of format uniformity or precise information, medical records might not always offer the insights needed to prepare the case. Even if the records are clear and easy to understand, it’s not sure that they will bring helpful information along.
Moreover, medical providers usually utilize multiple systems and processes to gather information and prepare records. Hence, it is possible to lose valuable insights that lawyers need to comprehend the series of events during the processing.
Solution
To make things way easier for yourself or your law firm staff, you may consider outsourcing to a professional company that can handle these tiring and time-taking jobs. Not only will this provide you access to on-demand support from experts, but you can also save non-billable hours.
Outsourcing to skilled external professionals will also ensure that the records are verified carefully and organized adequately before reaching you for final submission.
Challenge: 4 – Handwritten Medical Records Increase Interpretation Difficulties
Handwritten medical records are one of the most significant issues for legal professionals. Most of such records can give birth to patients’ safety issues if lawyers ignore or misunderstand critical medical information. In addition, handwriting that does not clearly define the information can make it challenging for lawyers to understand exactly what happened to the patient and the treatment provided.
Solution
The quickest solution to these problems can be using a document converter tool that can enhance the document’s quality, making it easy to view and read the records.
Another way you can rectify these issues is by contacting the person who prepared the records. Besides, you may also hire someone for this job or maybe outsource it to a reliable provider of medical record review services.
Challenge: 5 – Dealing with Excessive Workload Ruins Time Management & Schedule
Medical records comprise detailed information on a patient’s medical history, including diagnostic test results, data on pre and postoperative care, medication, progress in condition, etc. In most cases, a lawyer needs to retrieve, review, and interpret hundreds of thousands of medical records for a single case. As a result, lawyers and their paralegals need to spend a lot of time organizing them and taking keynotes.
Furthermore, legal assistants that do not have experience in medical cases might find it even more challenging to decide. This can, any day, lead them to pick irrelevant records, wasting several hours decoding crucial facts.
Solution
You can manage your time and work schedule even if you have loads of work. For example, you can simply outsource some of the most tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming functions, freeing yourself for more strategic work. You can even start with taking assistance from firms that offer litigation support services, including various legal back-office functions.
Conclusion
Challenges exist in every type of legal work, but better results come through solutions to those challenges. Hiring an experienced medical record review firm can make the entire review process easier and more efficient. With clear and professionally reviewed medical records, lawyers can save a lot of their time and effort.
