Overview
A medical legal nurse consultant conducts a critical study of clinically linked concerns in various legal settings. They may be current or former practicing nurses.
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What is a legal nurse consultant?
A legal nurse consultant is a registered nurse (RN) who uses their medical expertise to help with legal cases. They work with attorneys, insurance companies, and other legal professionals to review medical records, provide expert opinions, and explain medical issues related to personal injury, malpractice, or workers’ compensation cases. While they don’t practice law, they play a key role in bridging the gap between medicine and the legal field, helping to clarify complex medical information for legal teams.
When attorneys want chart review for personal injury, medical malpractice consulting, or other litigations involving hefty medical records, they seek out the service of legal nurse consultants or medical record review companies.
What does a legal nurse consultant do? In medical litigation, the role of the legal nurse consultant is to develop expert testimony to support defense theories regarding the standard of care and causation. In addition to that, medical-legal consultants help attorneys take care of all medical record-related tasks.
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How Legal Nurse Consultants Help Attorneys
Legal nurse consulting firms will have qualified clinical review consultants to assist the attorneys. Here are the five ways a medical legal consultant can help attorneys.
Retrieving Relevant Medical Records
As a preliminary step, the legal nurse consultant will identify the relevant medical records for the case. They will segregate the medical records by healthcare facilities and healthcare providers. While analyzing the medical records, additional relevant healthcare providers may be identified within the records. The records will also be checked for any missing pertinent health information. These missing records will be requested if required for the lawsuit. As HIPAA regulations back the healthcare industry, the applicant needs to sign an authorization for releasing the medical records.
Medical Record Sorting and Indexing
After receiving the medical records, the second step is to organize them in a chronological or provider-wise manner. The legal nurse reviewer will conduct an audit if the record request is complete.
Bookmarking the records and bates stamping is the next step in sorting the medical records. Bates stamping annotates the documents with alphanumeric characters, signifying the healthcare provider or facility where the records were received.
Medical record sorting and indexing help to identify the missing records, and it will help to analyze the flow of events.
Medical Chart Review
The review of medical records would generally focus on known facts in the case and other areas of concern. A medical chronology and/or timeline would also be completed along with the chart review. A raw medical record will also contain flow sheets, forms, and other non-pertinent data. While reviewing, only the information applicable to the claim would be included in the summary.
A skilled personal injury consultant or legal nurse consultant can easily fetch the information that is very vital to the case. Importantly, during the initial analysis, missing and potentially fraudulent records will be noted and listed. These records will be requested for the second round of review. In short, an expert legal nurse consultant can quickly look for missing records that may be potentially needed in that case. Legal nurse consultant reviews would be precise and accurate, thereby shouldering the lawsuit to a great extent.
Identifying Experts for Medical Opinion
The right medical expert opinion is vital to strengthen any personal injury or medical malpractice case. Legal nurse reviewers help injury attorneys determine the specialty of expert needed for that case. Also, they will help in finding an experienced and qualified medical expert to provide an opinion. Legal nurse consultant services would be more familiar with state-specific legal requirements as the requirements change from state to state.
Assist with Preparation of Trial
Legal nurse consulting services help the attorneys prepare fact sheets, and exhibits like treatment timelines, pain and suffering charts, medical chronologies, etc. Also, they can help in drafting questions to be used during testimonies, depositions, and interviews.
Final Thoughts
Legal nurse consultants and medical record review companies provide helpful solutions for attorneys in medical litigations. They serve broad practice areas such as workers’ compensation, medical malpractice, personal injury, and mass tort. The complex medical terminologies can be made simple by the expert legal nurse consultant and medical record review outsourcing companies so that the legal team can understand the medical facts practically and effectively.
The legal nurse sample reports done by LezDo legal nurse consultants can be the epitome of quality work.
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