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What you need to know about the independent medical examination

On Behalf of | Jul 23, 2024 | Workers' Compensation

A workplace injury can knock you out of work, leaving you without the financial resources necessary to meet your basic needs and pay for your medical care.

That can be extraordinarily stressful and create uncertainty about your future. But the workers’ compensation system may provide you with the financial relief that you need. If you can secure these benefits, then you’ll receive payments that assist in offsetting your lost wages and your medical expenses, thereby allowing you to focus on your recovery and getting back to work.

However, as you navigate your workers’ compensation case, your employer and their insurance company might throw up several roadblocks to try to prevent you from securing the benefits that you need. This includes requesting that you be subject to an independent medical examination.

What is an independent medical examination?

The independent medical examination is aimed at giving the insurance company a third-party opinion about the nature, extent, and cause of your injuries. While the hope is that this medical examiner is unbiased and can thus give a fair account of your injuries, the sad truth is that these doctors are often contracted with the insurance company, which may motivate them to be favorable to the insurance company’s position.

That said, you can have some say in who examines you. If you request to choose, then the insurance company will provide you with a list of approved providers from which you can select one.

While this limits your options, it still gives you a little bit of control. And that’s important given that the results of your independent medical examination can have a crucial impact on the outcome of your workers’ compensation case.

How can you prepare for an independent medical examination?

There’s a lot that you can do to ready yourself for this process. This includes:

  • Reviewing your medical history so that you have a firm understanding of your pre-existing conditions, which the medical examiner will likely ask you about.
  • Recalling the workplace event or events that led to your injury, since you’ll be asked about them extensively to see if your injuries align with the workplace accident in question.
  • Readying yourself to be honest, since the medical examiner will find out the truth and any exaggerations or falsehoods will work against you in your workers’ compensation case.
  • Refraining from minimizing your injuries, as this could limit your ability to recover the workers’ compensation benefits that you need and deserve.
  • Brining someone with you to the examination who can provide a witness account of what happened during the examination.
  • Being careful about what you say at the examination so that you don’t give the impression that you brought your injuries upon yourself by roughhousing or otherwise doing something you shouldn’t have been doing at work.
  • Being cognizant of the fact that the insurance company might be watching you in the days or weeks leading up to your examination to catch you in a lie when you consult with the examiner.

Be as prepared as possible as you navigate your workers’ compensation case

There are several nuances to the workers’ compensation claims process. You have to properly navigate them if you want to stand a chance of recovering the compensation you need and deserve.

This means knowing the law, your case’s weaknesses, and the tactics used by insurance companies to try to beat these claims.

By educating yourself as much as possible, you’ll hopefully be better positioned to secure the financial resources needed to allow you to fully focus on your recovery.