Matheson Philosophy on Workplace Safety and Work Injury Evaluation

A very valid point was recently raised by a physician who emailed me about the lack of consistency between evaluation systems and evaluators. There are several points that I discussed in response.

I have been doing many FCE's for the hospital where I work and we have one particular client (an attorney) for whom we do lots of them. We just had a meeting with one of the attorneys from our client's office and he has requested that if an FCE has come out as invalid or shows poor effort or reliability that I call him before generating a report in order to give him a heads up. He will then decide if he even wants the report at all - obviously if it doesn't look good for the client he will decline it. We would still get paid for the FCE, of course, and keep all the raw data for our records.

Question:

Getting written referral questions is like pulling teeth. We are thinking about making a referral form that can be checked off. What do you think and do you have any other suggestions on getting those?

Question:

How do you balance between being objective with the clients and doing an extensive review of the case and medical file? I have had private investigation reports thrown in to files. Also do payers balk at paying for time spent in reviewing and preparing for FCE?

Answer:

My suggestion is one you have heard before: the referral questions and the purpose for referral establish the scope of the engagement. Are you being retained to administer a straight-forward FCE? Are you being retained as an expert witness for the purposes of file review?