How to prepare a medical chronology report that helps you get your claim on time?

What is medical chronology? A medical chronology, in simple terms, is a patient’s medical history listed in chronological order. It is a date-wise list of all the incidents concerning the medical history of the patient.

It includes the date and time of the visit, details of the healthcare provider, the patient’s injury, the treatment provided, the possible issues the patient would be facing in the future, a hyperlink to the referenced information, and the type of record.

It is also a crucial part of any medico-legal case. A good chronology provides facts and sources acceptable in a court, aiding you in winning your case. A medical chronology report is different when compared to other legal and medical documents.

They are easily understandable to a wider audience who may not understand legal and medical terms. It helps everyone in the trial to understand the facts.

Need for a Medical Chronology Report

• Analyzing medical records for a personal injury claim is usually long, complex, and time-consuming for a normal-lay person to find the essential data in a particular case. Through medical chronology summary services, you create a chronology report with all the pertinent data in brief.
• A medical record is a report that incorporates medical jargon that cannot be understood by normal-lay people. This makes the trial a complex one. But in a chronology report, only simple terms understandable by the attorney, jury, insurers, and all the people in the trial are used.
• Medical record chronologies assist legal teams in determining relevant facts, determining liability, and establishing successful legal strategies by providing medical evidence in a comprehensible and organized manner.
• These reports provide information about a patient’s prior diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes to medical experts and legal professionals. This information helps with accurate diagnosis, treatment planning, and offering compensation.

Elements of a Medical Record Chronology Report

How to write a chronology of events for the court? The chronological record of medical care plays a significant role in the case, especially in a personal injury claim. How to write chronology reports? In preparing medical records chronologies, deciphering the medical and legal jargon from the medical report and replacing them with easily understandable terms needs years of experience in the medical field.

A company providing medical chronology review service can help you create perfect legal medical chronology reports that assist your legal team in acquiring your claim. The basic elements of a chronological medical report are listed below,

• Date of Injury (DOI)
• Cause of the injury or illness
• Medical history of the patient
• Diagnostic tests and results
• Treatment providers
• Dates of treatment
• Treatment plans and procedures, which would include diagnostic reports, prescriptions, referrals and surgeries
• Prognosis or the likelihood of recovery
• Permanent impairment, if any
• Future medical needs, if any
• Information about prior as well as unrelated medical treatment, if any
• Deciphering and summarizing notes and handwritten notes of physicians and nurses
• The definition of medical terms can be included in a medical summary for quick reference.

See the medical records chronology template to understand its quality.

Medical Chronology Template

The given sample chronology report depicts the report prepared for a motor vehicle accident claim. The details of the accident, chief complaints, and the physical examination details of the claimant are reflected in the legal chronology template.

Steps to Prepare a Medical Chronology Report

How to prepare a medical chronology report? A medical chronology report is prepared by experts and companies that provide medical chronology services. While preparing medical chronologies, these experts follow certain methods that help you win your claim. As a medical chronologist, follow the steps explained below to prepare chronological medical record summaries.

1. Be prompt: The first and foremost step in preparing a legal, medical chronology is to begin straight away without any delay. Facts play a key role in the report. From the first moment you speak to the client, you start your preparation. Being prompt, you don’t miss any data given to you by the client, as every piece of data given by the client is important. Some may seem unimportant at the beginning but will turn out to be the most pertinent information to win the case.
2. Acquiring the medical records: The best way to start preparing a medical case chronology report is by interviewing the client. Only by speaking to the client can you extract pieces of information. We must determine the medical records that could be required for this case. To determine it, you have to identify the healthcare provider the client has visited. After identifying the healthcare provider, they are requested for the medical records. In certain scenarios, if the client is a minor or mentally challenged, the medical records cannot be lent without the consent certificate of the client. If all the procedures are clear, the medical records will be released by the provider.
3. Bates numbering: Now that all the medical records are obtained, the companies that provide medical chronology summary services start numbering the pages in the records. Each page in the medical record is numbered for the identification of data in the future for the trial. They also make sure that no data is missed. This numbering system is called the Bates numbering system in the legal field.
4.  List down all the facts: The next step is reviewing all the records thoroughly. Each of the medical documents is assessed, and the important facts are jotted down with the Bates number. By following this process, the data is documented in chronological order. In this process, a list of missing medical records, documentation errors, and medical record tampering will be highlighted. If any records are found missing later, the case may not proceed to trial.
5. Use of database software: In common, word-processing software is used to prepare a chronology report, whereas database software has numerous advantages over it. The most prominent advantage is that the database software automatically sorts the data provided and also adds the day for every date entered by the user. It saves a lot of time and also helps in spellcheck. Providing all these features makes the process of documenting data in chronological order easy.
6. Include all the facts: Entering every fact is a must while preparing a medical chronology report for litigations such as personal injury or workers’ compensation. Irrelevant to the importance of the fact, it is to be listed. Even facts that are questionable or disputed must be added. Some facts may seem to have no consequence in the case; still, they are to be added. The value of a fact cannot be determined unless the case is over.
7. Evaluate the facts: Once all the facts are listed by using the database software, the important part in the process of preparing a medical summary report begins it’s evaluating the facts. Each fact listed in the report is evaluated for its relevance and validity. Now, the chronology report is a list of legitimate facts, consisting of the provider’s name, date, and time of treatment, facts related to the case, Bates number, and hyperlinks that navigate to the medical record from which the information was taken.

The above-mentioned are some of the vital factors to be considered by a medical records chronologist while preparing medical chronology reports for claims.

At LezDo TechMed, we draft fact-oriented chronological medical records summaries to bolster personal injury claims. Get our medical record chronology USA services to know their effectiveness. You can download our medical chronology samples and legal case chronology template to know how precise they are.

How to make your medical chronology report better?

Accurate and condensed medical records chronology reports are prepared objectively and unbiasedly, providing all the necessary facts in an easily detectable format. However, while drafting the medical record summary and chronology, if you include the following, it will abet you in winning your convoluted litigation like a piece of cake.

1. Medical record sorting/indexing: 

Sorting out all the medical records pertaining to the case is hectic because some lawsuits will have huge piles of medical records. It will take many of your precious hours to search for your needed records. You should sort and index your records first. Properly arranged medical records will help discern the inevitable evidence crucial in personal injury, medical malpractice, or workers’ comp lawsuits.

2. Missing record identification:

More than reviewing the medical records, identifying the missing records is crucial to the cases. Missing medical records can tremendously impact even strong litigations, which can be won easily.

During your document evaluation, you should collect the provider’s name, the date of service, the next appointment, medical bills, and treatment gaps, which can then be compared to the accessible data. Following that, a thorough list of missing records can be created, including dates, provider names, record types, and their significance to case analysis. Thus, it will help you to retrieve the missing records easily.

3. Duplicate records extraction:

When you gather the medical records, you may get different sets of records from various facilities. Sometimes, there are chances for many duplicate copies to be mixed with them. The presence of multiple duplicate records might create confusion during the litigation process. Recognizing and extracting the duplicates will reduce the size of the bulky documents and also avoid confusion.

4. Treatment timeline:

After reviewing all the records, prepare a treatment timeline. A treatment timeline is a pictorial depiction of the significant events in the medical records in chronological order. In a graphical representation of the chart, components such as the event name, the event date, and the facility/provider name are to be added. It’s like a synopsis of the entire treatment undergone by the patient.

5. Bookmarking: 

Bookmarking means giving the gist of all your contents in the form of a table for easy navigation. You can bookmark your records in different methods. You can form a chronological order of medical records based on the list of providers the patient has visited or on the various medical record types.

6. Hotlinks/hyperlinks:

Hyperlink the references in the medical chronology report to the medical records PDF. By clicking the hyperlinks in the linked document, you can easily navigate to the needed pages in the original documents. Instead of shuffling through the mammoth of records for specific points, you can access them with a click.

7. Med-a-word: 

Med-a-Word enhances the comprehension of medical terms appearing in medical chronologies and narrative summaries of deposition transcripts. Definitions will pop up once the reader hovers the mouse over the desired medical terminology. This is a boon to all in understanding the baffling medical terminologies.

8. Medical bill analysis:

The medical bills incurred by the facilities or providers for the plaintiff’s treatment pertaining to the litigation are to be analyzed. Record them chronologically in separate sheets based on the providers’ names and types of treatment availed. From the records, you can extract the treatment details and the amount spent. Note down the sum of the total cost of the treatment. If any amount is not related to the litigation, it also can be noted if required.

9. Pain and suffering chart:

Like the special compensatory damages, non-economic damages like pain and suffering, emotional distress, anxiety, and discomfort, which stem from the injuries, also have significance. Therefore, prepare an interactive pain and suffering chart with information on the patient’s mental trauma and discomfort. This helps to convince the defendants or the insurance providers during the settlement.

The pain and suffering chart records the date, provider’s name, chief complaints, location of the pain, and pain scale. It also consists of the names of the pain medications taken and the dosages, prognosis, assessment, and treatment plan.

10. Pain medication chart:

The pain medication chart captures the list of pain medications, the providers who prescribed them, and the dosage. The chart highlights whether the particular medication is advocated to relieve inflammation, pain, or other injury conditions. It also records any allergy or after effect in the patient due to the pain medication. Once you prepare that, you need not dive inside the ocean of records to check for the details whenever you need them.

11. Medical synopsis: 

Medical synopsis is specially formed to contain an overview of the precise medical history of the patient. It also points out the merits and demerits of the case to help in winning the litigation. Preparing a medical synopsis would give the reader an overall idea of the case, even without referring to the original records.

Medical summaries and chronologies prepared by expert medical record review services would not be based on a medical chronology template. Instead, it would be customized based on the case.

Final Thoughts

It is a proven fact that the quality of medical chronology reports can change the destiny of a claim. Well-constructed medical chronology reports make a great difference in the trial. It helps you acquire your claim in a short span of time, saving you from lengthy trials.

Precise medical chronologies with additional and special components like bookmarking, indexing, and hyperlinking would make your legal processes like a walk in the park. Going through the sample medical chronology summary report of LezDo TechMed, you would have understood how to do a medical chronology report sample. Our medical chronologies by physicians and medical records summaries are often pointed out by our clients as the perfect medical chronology examples.