There are many important pieces of your personal injury case that your attorney’s team will handle for you. This includes speaking to insurance companies on your behalf, helping find and solve issues in your case, and create and send documents. One of the most important things that the team does is collect medical records.
Once you have finished all your medical care, and you feel like you are back to the physical state that you were before the accident, then your case can move forward, and your team can start to gather all your medical records and bills together.
Your team can usually only start to gather those records once you have finished treating. This is so they don’t miss any dates of treatment or costs. As the insurance reviews your records, they will be able to see that there is something missing, and your case will be prolonged as that missing piece of information is found. Also, if there is missing information, and your case gets settled, and those costs are not factored into your case, then those costs could come out later and take away from your expected takeaway amount. It also makes the process faster to get everything at the same time.
Occasionally, if you have gone to the emergency room or needed emergency surgery, then your team will get those records and bills as soon as they can. Once they have those bills, which are often very costly, they can advise you on how your case could go moving forward.
After you have finished treatment, your team will start to reach out to everywhere you were treated and get your records and bills. Someone from the team will usually reach out to you to verify all of the places you went to. This will include your primary care physician, chiropractor, physical therapist, therapist and counselor, and anything else related to the accident.
Some clients wonder if they are able to get the records themselves, and while it can be a good thing to do at the last minute, you usually do not get all the information that the insurance requires. Because of the request form that our attorneys have created, we are able to get everything we need usually in one go.
This process could take some time. Your treatment centers often need to find all the records inside all of their files and forward them to us. They have 30 days to send us the information before we can reach out to them and request the records again. At this time the collectors will also reach out to you to get information about wage loss as well to add to your files. To make the process go faster, responding quickly will be to your benefit.
Once the records finally come in, your medical collector will put everything together in files and send it forward. During this time of collecting records, they will look out for anything that could be a problem for your case or that where it seems like you might need additional care. For example, you maybe spoke with a doctor who mentioned that you might need injections, but you never followed up on that. If you still have some pain, you might want to go back and get those injections.
These collectors will also get information if your doctor said you will need injections or surgery in the future. These future costs can be added to your case final cost to show the insurance companies that you will continue to need care.
Occasionally, your case will be sent to the insurance, and they will read about a past injury, and they will request past medical records. This could be that you injured yourself during a basketball game or skiing, and since you had back pain, which was then exacerbated by a car accident. The insurance will want to look at those records, and make sure that pain is actually related to the car accident.
This will mean that your medical collector will have to get all your medical records from 5 years or more before the accident, and this could take a while to get. If you have a comprehensive list of all the doctors and care you received, this process will move quickly as well.
This process is very important in your case, and can take a long time because of how important it is to get everything right.
The best way that you can help is to respond quickly and wholly for any information that is requested of you.
Your attorney and their team are striving to make sure that your case is handled with the best care, and this includes getting all the medical information put together thoroughly and comprehensively. While this process can take a little bit longer than you might expect, it is very important to make sure all is done correctly.
Flickinger • Boulton • Robson • Weeks is here to help. We have over 150 years of combined experience representing personal injury victims. We offer free case evaluations to discuss how we can represent you. Call 801.500.4000 to schedule yours today.
