24 May Sorting Nursing Home Records

Putting a loved one in the care of a nursing home is never an easy thing—especially when it’s so common to hear of abuse cases in nursing homes. But at times, there seems to be no other option. And when a family does feel that their loved one has been mistreated, harmed, or even fatally injured as the result of poor care, they often pursue a nursing home abuse case.

Attorney Opportunities with Nursing Home Abuse Cases

As an attorney, there’s a lot of opportunity to help families with these sensitive cases. If you specialize in nursing home abuse cases, you’re well aware of the tedious work required to review the medical records that could support a case. A nursing home abuse case requires that an attorney search back through ten years of medical records. In rare cases, an individual might have medical records from a consistent source for most of their life. Most of the time, however, medical records are disorganized and less than straightforward, making them a hassle to sort through.

The Grey Area of Nursing Home Abuse Cases

Families are in particular need of an experienced attorney when they wish to pursue a nursing home abuse case. This is because incidents that may be perceived as abuse are never really black and white. For instance, blame can fall on the patients themselves as well as the caretakers in a situation where a patient is unwilling to receive the proper help. A patient might refuse medication or treatment, making it impossible for caretakers to help without force. Other times an injury might not be the result of a push, but may instead be related to a previous injury, a fact that would be revealed in medical records. Only a thorough examination of a person’s medical records can reveal whether an injury or fatality is the result of negligence or abuse from the nursing home.

Sorting Nursing Home Records

Our company has perfected our method of sorting through medical records to make it easier for attorneys to put their time towards efficient and purposeful research. We have two ways of sorting through an individual’s medical records: episodal and chronological.

In an episodal sort, our company searches records for keywords related to the incident in question. For example, if the patient fell and broke their hip at the nursing home, our search will look for words, phrases, and previous incidents related to the hip bone. Any time something relevant comes up, it gets “red boxed,” or highlighted for easy reference by date and incident.

With a chronological sort, our company simply takes all of the records from the last ten years and places them in order. When obtaining a person’s medical records, they often come to you from many different sources and different times, completely out of order and context. Our chronological sort takes this chaos and makes it approachable and readable.

If you’ve been asked to investigate a possible nursing home abuse case, these methods can save you time and effort that will be better spent on defending the family. Without the hassle of collecting records, organizing dates and sources, and deciphering old, hand-written records, you can focus on the information you find from an approachable collection of ready-to-read records.