When dealing with mass tort cases, the success of a case depends majorly upon the relevant medical information associated with it. Law firms are responsible for collecting and analysing large amounts of data that serve as evidence of abuse, damage, and treatment of all the parties involved.
To win such complicated cases that involve multiple plaintiffs and defendants, medical data must be carefully and accurately managed. However, the process of obtaining and organizing medical information, analysing and summarizing the medical history of numerous plaintiffs, and reporting on the findings can be time-consuming and laborious.
Therefore, in order to streamline the process of reviewing medical records, many law firms and attorneys are exploring forming partnerships with litigation support providers. In this blog, we’re discussing the importance of outsourcing medical record organization, analysis, and summarization for lawyers, medico-legal consultants, and more.
What Are The Services That Medical Record Support Teams Provide?
The term “mass tort lawsuit” refers to litigation in which multiple plaintiffs allege that they suffered the same injury as a result of the defendant’s conduct. These cases often involve injuries caused by medical devices, hazardous pollution, pharmaceutical medications, and so on, and they may involve one or more defendants. The following is a list of the most important work that a litigation support team that is provided by an outsourcing company can do for a law firm:
- Collecting or retrieving medical records from the associated parties
- Putting together and arranging the medical records of plaintiffs
- Marking the records with bookmarks and highlighting the key data
- Examining plaintiffs’ medical history and documents
- Determining the extent of the damage caused and categorizing documents accordingly
- Providing an explanation of the accepted level of care
- Putting together a chronology of the medical case
- A summarization of the most important aspects of the injuries and damages brought about by the faulty product or the medicine
Benefits Of Outsourcing Litigation Support In Mass Tort Cases
- Save overall costs
Medical records contain voluminous amounts of sensitive information on a patient, as well as extensive jargon used in the field of medicine. It can take attorneys a significant amount of time to sift through hundreds, if not thousands, of medical data. Additionally, the price of employing paralegals and other support staff, as well as the time and effort required to train them, to thoroughly study medical records, can be reduced with outsourcing. With the help of a competent medical record summarization team, the firm will be prepared to tackle the task at hand, resolve any issues that may arise, and achieve the best possible results as soon as possible.
- Increase data security
Professional litigation support services have a rigorous data security infrastructure in place, guaranteeing the privacy of their clients’ sensitive documents and medical records. When it comes to protecting patient information, reputable businesses will always adhere to HIPAA’s stringent privacy and security regulations. Strong privacy and security safeguards will be in place, and frequent risk assessments and self-audits will be performed. A piece of general advice would be to investigate whether or not your prospective cloud provider has undergone a recent Service Organization Control audit or has received a similar certification to ensure that you and the claimants’ data is secure.
- Improve internal productivity
Legal firms benefit from the assistance of professional medical review companies while handling mass tort cases since this allows the firm’s attorneys to focus on the lawsuit rather than the case management. They are readily available to assist your business, so you can rest confident that your cases will be resolved as quickly and effectively as possible. Experts in the medical-legal field work for litigation support companies and their hundreds of cases help other businesses speed up their own reviews.
- Receive exactly what is needed
Due to the dynamic nature of medical record summarization, staffing can be problematic for mass tort litigation. A legal team and other personnel may have considerably less experience collecting and analysing medical matters as compared to an experienced record summarization firm. You may rely on litigation support businesses to have the staff and resources necessary to undertake thorough record reviews on short notice. They can efficiently and expertly review and summarize projects of any size.
- Effective & Transparent communication
When dealing with mass tort cases, communication is key to ensuring that no question remains unanswered, and no detail is missed. Outsourced litigation support teams have a specific process that they follow to make sure that all the communication with the firm and other parties involved is transparent and timely.
- Higher efficiency
Service providers who examine and summarize medical records are familiar with the complexities of the process as well as the important specificity that is necessary for proper record interpretation and summarization. Their staff is always prepared to provide assistance, so you can rest assured that your organization’s tasks will be completed on time and your issues will be resolved successfully.
The team of litigation support providers like ITCube BPM consists of medical-legal professionals that have worked on hundreds of cases that are very similar to one another. This enables businesses to quicken the examination of their own cases by capitalizing on the experience of the service provider. The medical review team is able to rapidly and effectively glean the relevant information from the medical records because of their extensive experience in medical-legal documentation. The lawyer can then determine whether or not all of the claimants have suffered from the same injury.
Some of the most challenging aspects of lawsuit preparation for law firms are often the retrieving, arranging, and summarising of medical information. To be able to transform massive amounts of medical records into persuasive arguments in the courts, one must have a solid understanding of medical terminology as well as the factors that cause and are affected by medication.
As a result of having access to these abilities through an outsourced partner, attorneys and law firms are able to dedicate more time to the preparation of mass tort cases, which, in turn, lays the path for success.