Medical Legal Consulting News, November 2013
IN THIS ISSUE:
- Song and dance
- Vocabulary Quiz: Really BIG diagnoses
Greetings! Welcome to the Fall issue of Medical Legal Consulting News from MLCS, Inc. We close out our year of music-themed newsletters with a “Broadway musical” article that addresses how we handle the very large reviews (10,000 pages+) that have everything! Complementing this is a medical terminology quiz including some of the longest single diagnoses that we have seen in recent record reviews.
We are thankful for you and the opportunity to continue to summarize, interpret and analyze medical records for all types of personal injuries. We appreciate your patience as MLCS has experienced growing pains this past year, adding new staff and adapting to new technology to better serve you.
As always, your feedback on our client survey, emailed periodically, is most appreciated and helpful to us as we continue to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of our medical record reviews.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Sincerely,
Linda Luedtke, RN, MSN
President, Director of Consulting Services
Song and Dance
Complex and lengthy medical records have a lot going on—just like a Broadway music.
With increasing frequency, MLCS encounters cases with exceptionally extensive records (more than 10,000 pages) and, like a Broadway musical, these cases usually have a lot going on. Often, the claimants involved in these cases have a long, particularly complicated pre-existing medical history as well as significant treatment post-accident. When a claimant treats over many years, sees many different specialists and/or has multiple diagnoses, their medical records may read like an energetic dance number, where key characters may be lost amid a flurry of information.
The experienced MLCS nurse works to sift out the backstory and to focus in on the essential points. This can be a slow process of working through one act or episode (a set of records from a given time frame or provider) at a time, following the main players through various events, appointments and issues until the bigger picture comes together. The nurse can then begin to string together a review spotlighting the most critical moments, discerning the essential information from the non-essential.
As the story concludes, the MLCS nurse consultant turns to the bills and, like a show’s director, checks line by line to determine which treatments relate to the alleged injury and which do not, given the details of the story.
Of course, such big productions rarely stop at one curtain call, often requiring multiple addendums to address new records. It’s not uncommon that each new set of records may contain a reference to treatment related to or relevant to the alleged injuries.
In these situations, the reprisals of that same old song (that is, redundant or duplicate records that add nothing new to the story), are cast out, leaving only fresh data for the nurse to work through. With her knowledge of the story so far, the MLCS nurse revisits her review and expands the major events or fills in the previous plot holes with the submitted information—the end result being a medical records review that reduces all that song and dance to the core story pulled from the facts heard and seen in the medical records.
Vocabulary Quiz: Really BIG Diagnoses
Match these really big diagnoses to the best fitting little word that gives a clue about the diagnosis. Some little words are used more than once.