Workers’ comp claims cases are nothing short of a cobweb. They have so many intricate layers that demand careful reviews and much time to go through every step of the process. Both the defense and the plaintiff side must navigate a challenging but essential claims process for insurers to evaluate the claim and release compensation that helps injured workers rebuild their lives.
When workers’ comp cases escalate into mass tort or class action suits, they demand an entirely different level of legal and administrative effort. A critical aspect that shapes the value, defensibility, and speed of these claims is the review of medical records. For decades, attorneys and insurers have relied on medical experts to comb through thousands of pages to gain clarity on each case. That manual effort is both time-consuming and expensive, especially considering that records often arrive from multiple providers in scattered, unstructured formats.
This is where medical record summarization becomes essential. It provides attorneys, adjusters, and case managers with a clear and concise view of what happened medically, when it occurred, and how it affected the injured party. Below, we explore three essential types of medical summaries that play a crucial role in resolving workers’ compensation claims and examine how AI-powered medical record review services are transforming the entire process.
Deposition Summary: The cornerstone of legal strategy
Attorneys preparing for depositions rely heavily on medical records to identify timelines, inconsistencies, and patterns in a claimant’s injury history. A deposition summary condenses the key points from deposition transcripts. It highlights testimonies related to diagnosis, treatment, causation, and ongoing limitations.
During the discovery phase, attorneys use deposition summaries to question witnesses, establish credibility, and challenge or defend the medical basis of a claim. Without a precise summary, they often lose valuable hours searching through lengthy transcripts and disconnected treatment records. With medical record summarization powered by AI, legal teams can receive these summaries in a digestible, chronologically sorted format, saving both time and effort while building stronger cases.
Plaintiff Fact Sheets: Essential in mass tort and class action cases
Mass tort and class action lawsuits in workers’ comp scenarios involve hundreds, sometimes thousands, of plaintiffs. In such cases, law firms and claims administrators use Plaintiff Fact Sheets (PFS) to extract key medical, occupational, and personal details from each claimant’s file. These documents serve as standardized tools to evaluate eligibility, damages, and the viability of a case.
Creating PFS manually is labor-intensive. Each sheet must summarize multiple medical encounters and highlight the relevant conditions associated with the injury or exposure at hand. When firms adopt AI-driven medical record summarization, generating these fact sheets becomes faster, more accurate, and scalable. The AI can pull diagnostic codes, treatment plans, and physician notes directly from the records and automatically populate the required fields. That reduces manual data entry errors and improves consistency across large dockets.
Attending Physician Statement (APS) Summarization: Key to claims decisions
For insurers, the Attending Physician Statement is often the most valuable document when deciding on a claim. It outlines the treating physician’s opinion on diagnosis, treatment provided, functional restrictions, and whether the injury is work-related. A well-summarized APS can mean the difference between timely claims resolution and prolonged disputes.
However, APS documents are frequently buried deep in hundreds of pages. Manually identifying and extracting them can delay the adjudication process. AI-based summarization tools can isolate APS forms, extract key insights, and present them in a summary that is easy to review and cite in decisions. It helps adjusters and insurers make faster, evidence-based decisions while reducing the risk of litigation.
Where these summaries fit in the Workers’ Comp Claims Lifecycle
Each of the three summaries serves a distinct purpose at different stages of a claim or litigation:
- Deposition summaries come into play during the discovery and pre-trial phases when attorneys need quick access to relevant testimony and related medical records.
- Plaintiff fact sheets are foundational in the early stages of class action or mass tort claims, as they help organize and filter cases based on merit.
- Attending physician statements are crucial for insurers during the initial claim assessment and in any return-to-work decisions.
Organized, searchable, and consistent summaries enable stakeholders to collaborate more effectively and advance cases without being overwhelmed by paperwork.
The AI advantage in medical record summarization
Medical record review is no longer just about summarizing; it is also about analyzing and interpreting. It is about making critical information accessible, defensible, and usable. AI-powered medical record summarization combines natural language processing and machine learning to:
- Identify relevant medical details, including diagnosis, treatments, tests, and physician notes.
- Organize records chronologically and index them clearly and concisely.
- Remove duplicate records and link similar entries.
- Generate tailored outputs, such as deposition summaries, Plaintiff Fact Sheets, or APS summaries, to meet the specific needs of various stakeholders.
The result is a streamlined process that saves hours of manual work, reduces errors, and enables legal and claims professionals to focus on resolution rather than record retrieval and record organizing.
Related: AI-Powered Medical Record Review: Automating Indexing and Summarization with NLP
LevelShift: Your strategic partner in AI medical record summarization
If organizing medical records is an art, then LevelShift is the Marie Kondo of it. With over two decades of industry experience, LevelShift provides specialized support to attorneys and insurers handling workers’ compensation claims. Over the past few years, we have integrated AI into our processes and developed a proprietary MRRM (Medical Records Review & Management) application that automates the summarization of unstructured medical records.
Our AI/ML model is pre-trained with millions of pages of medical documentation across various requirements. It delivers consistent, litigation-ready summaries—tailored to the needs of legal, insurance, and case management professionals.
Do you want to simplify your next case or claims review? Contact LevelShift to see how our AI-powered medical record summarization can bring order, speed, and clarity to your most complex cases.
