Sometimes an insurance company asks a claimant to attend an independent medical examination (IME). Companies do that when the adjuster has reason to doubt the claims about the reported injury.
Claimants should know what to expect, after being scheduled for an IME.
• No claimant should have to receive more than one exam.
• The insurer should pay for that same examination.
• The examination should be arranged to take place at the convenience of the claimant.
• The adjuster should confirm the limits of the examination.
• A claimant would not be under any obligation to attend an IME, if those expectations were not being met.
Weakness in any conclusion from an IME
The doctor doing the examination has limited knowledge of the patient/claimant. The doctor doing the examination has limited knowledge of the patient’s disability or medical history. The examining physician could come up with a finding that failed to take into account the patient’s disability, if any, as well as his/her medical history.
The significance of the IME’s weakness
Personal injury lawyers in Sherwood Park are well aware of the fact that the IME has an unquestionable weakness. Consequently, an attorney for a claimant, the recipient of an independent medical examination, would have a sound reason for challenging the results of the scheduled exam.
That challenge could be used to protect a client, so that he or she did not feel obligated to take on a specific task.
—That task could be returning to work
—That task could be searching for a job
—That task could be attempting to recover from an injury in the absence of sufficient treatment.
Obviously, it would not be fair to any man or woman to ask that their efforts get directed toward the accomplishment of any such task. That is why personal injury lawyers should be ready to explain to their clients’ what plans are in place for dealing with the weak findings of an independent medical exam.
Staff in one department that know a lot about IMEs
Those are members of the staff in the Human Resources Department. Each of those staff members could recognize a false conclusion from the physician that had performed the examination. Each of them would understand the probable outcome for an attempt by a claimant to live up to a physician’s improper finding, regarding an absence of symptoms.
Personal injury lawyers know how to take advantage of the expectations from the staff in the Department of Human Resources. Their expectations can be used to support a lawyer’s challenge to the observations of the examining physician. Yet not all personal injury lawyers make that fact clear to their clients, following revelation of the troubling results of the scheduled examination.