Anyone that has filed a personal injury claim should expect the adjuster to request the relevant medical records.
How to deal with such a request?
Check with a Personal Injury Lawyer in London and see if what has been requested is reasonable. If it is, prepare for the next step. Ask the insurance company to pay for the records. Do not accept an oral promise of payment. Ask to have an agreement to pay in writing.
Do not give insurance company the ability to go after your medical records. You should obtain them and review them. Remove any records that do not pertain to your injury.
Suppose that what was requested did not seem reasonable to your attorney. What should you do? In that case, ask the adjuster why specific records are needed. If you feel that the sharing of any record qualifies as an invasion of your privacy, refuse to honor the adjuster’s request.
Words of warning
Never let the adjuster speak with your doctor. If the adjuster were to call the doctor’s office, the person receiving the call could be a secretary of nurse. Either of them might say something that could weaken your claim.
Never sign any form that allows copies of all your medical records to be placed in a package, and sent to the adjuster.
What might be added to the adjuster’s requests?
If the information in your medical record does not seem to agree with the facts uncovered during the investigation, the insurance company might ask the claimant to attend an independent medical exam (IME). Claimants have the right to refuse to go to an IME, unless their own insurance company has scheduled it, or the same IME is meant to offer evidence that could get used in a lawsuit.
A claimant’s refusal to attend an IME could be based on a feeling that it represented an invasion of privacy. Also, if the claimant’s medical condition were to prohibit completion of a trip to the IME’s proposed site, then the insurance company ought to furnish the needed transportation.
After the independent medical exam, the claimant-lawyer team has the right to contest the results from that exam. The legal system has been designed to accommodate a situation where a claimant’s rights must be respected. In order to respect those rights, the claimant’s lawyer has the right to question the findings that might have come from any IME.
Smart lawyers make that fact clear to each of their recovering clients. Otherwise, a client might feel as though he or she has to look for a job, or return to a former workplace. In reality, the client would have no legal obligation to undertake either of those specific actions.