What is a Medical Chronology and How is it Used?

What is a medical chronology? 

A medical chronology is a report that summarizes a patient’s medical history in chronological order. It often includes information on the treatments, lab results, medical procedures, and prescriptions that a patient receives over time. Medical chronologies are used frequently in injury and disability-related legal cases. Attorneys often hire paralegals and legal assistants to review all of their clients' medical records and report the most important information to the attorney in the form of a chronology. This process ensures that attorneys and insurance companies can more quickly gain a comprehensive understanding of a client’’s medical history and claims. 

What does a medical chronology include? 

A medical chronology provides an organized overview of a patient’s health history. It captures the critical moments and medical insights that can help attorneys and insurance companies build stronger cases, while the use of AI-powered technology reduces the chances of manual error and work time. Tavrn’s AI accelerates the process of compiling and summarizing medical information, extracting key insights from diagnosis to treatment. By providing an overview of a patient’s key medical events and themes in chronological order with click-to-verify hyperlinks, it is significantly easier to identify the important details when needed. 

A medical chronology compiles the most important information pertaining to each of a patient’s individual medical visits and events. It often includes examinations, procedures, lab results, and relevant findings. Tavrn also offers clients the option to add a condition-specific summary to their final chronology, instructing our technology to extract the most important pieces of information related to specific conditions. Tavrn’s technology gives attorneys and insurance companies the opportunity to cut costs by 90%, providing high-accuracy results in just a few hours at a fraction of the market cost.

What are the benefits of using medical chronologies? 

‍Medical chronologies are extremely useful in ensuring attorneys and insurance companies have a strong understanding of a patient’s case. Reviewing medical records can take attorneys and insurance companies extensive amounts of time–often having to parse through thousands of pages of medical records per patient. Paralegals and legal assistants spend hours organizing documents, synthesizing doctor’s notes, and compiling each patient’s medical information. A chronology allows for attorneys to look through several years worth of a person’s medical history in a significantly shorter amount of time, as it makes specific issues easy to find and drastically reduces the quantity of information needed to parse through.  Having a clear timeline of medical events helps attorneys to more easily draw conclusions, identify points of negligence, note where providers’ decisions may have differed from normal standards of care, etc. Once attorneys have drawn their conclusions, medical chronologies can easily be shared with experts for their review and testimony. Presenting experts with medical chronologies as opposed to complete medical records to review/validate a specific medical event or piece of information can drastically reduce the cost of their services, saving attorneys time and money. 

‍What types of cases are medical chronologies used for? 

Medical chronologies are used for a number of different legal areas, with personal injury, workers compensation, and medical malpractice being the most frequent. In personal injury cases, medical chronologies allow attorneys to track how the client’s injury developed over time, outline the relevant events leading up to/following the injury, and try to establish the cause of the injury. The events within a client’s medical history can have a significant impact on a case’s strength and how attorney’s choose to structure it. 

Typically, workers compensation cases also require documentation of the medical care that employees received, using chronologies to establish a relationship between work incidents and medical conditions and report ongoing disability/recovery. Consider this example: A construction worker recently filed a workers’ compensation claim to cover medical expenses and lost wages due to an injury they sustained on the job. A medical chronology is used in this case to summarize all of the workers medical history, when the injury was sustained, how it was treated, how the issue has progressed, and the medical state which the worker is in now. Attorneys can use this information to clearly show the medical injury was related to the worker’s job, the worker is unable to complete his job as normal as a result of the injury, and is therefore subject to financial compensation from the worker’s employer to cover the costs of the injury. 

In medical malpractice cases, chronologies quickly allow attorneys and experts to analyze medical history retrospectively–highlighting events/important indicators that providers may have missed and assessing whether a physician’s negligence truly had an impact on the patient’s health. Consider this example: A patient visits their primary care doctor because they are experiencing long-term abdominal pain and unexplained weight loss. The doctor diagnoses the patient with nonsevere gastrointestinal issues and prescribes them medication to treat it. After several months of unresolved symptoms, the patient decides to see a specialist. The specialist runs several tests and determines that the patient has advanced stomach cancer, which had likely been developing since before the patient initially saw their primary care doctor. The patient believes that if their primary care doctor had correctly diagnosed their condition initially, it would have significantly improved their quality of life and prognosis, therefore deciding to sue the primary care physician. In this case, a medical chronology would be instrumental in identifying any gaps or errors in the diagnostic process, determining whether or not the primary care physician’s assessment differed from standard care practices, and showing how earlier intervention would have changed the patient’s ultimate outcome. 

Conclusion 

A medical chronology can be an invaluable tool in legal cases, providing a clear, organized, and comprehensive record of a client’s medical history. The efficiency of these chronologies allows attorneys, insurance companies, and experts to save time and resources by being able to efficiently analyze their clients’ information. Whether drawing connections and establishing causation between incidents or tracing the development of an illness or injury, medical chronologies have a crucial role in constructing legal cases.