Have you ever faced the unfortunate situation where your “trusted” life care planner constructs a future needs report for your client only for you to realize that their report was not tailored toward the nuances of a personal injury case?
This can be devastating to your case as you’ve just invested thousands of dollars, for its value to be diminished or even dismissed as irrelevant.
We see this happen all too often in personal injury cases due to the simple misconception that all life care planners are created equal. While all life care planners are indeed certified, many are not familiar or trained in personal injury specific life care plans and instead work primarily in elder care cases, where they develop a strategy that helps define a senior’s wishes and assists caregivers / family in handling the physical, personal, and financial affairs of their aging process. This type of life care plan is MUCH different than a custom life care plan tailored towards your client who has impairments and disabilities that they sustained in an automobile accident.
If you think about it, you wouldn’t hire a general surgeon to perform an ACL reconstruction surgery on your knee, it’s much wiser to hire a “knee-specific” orthopedic surgeon that works on knees on a daily basis.
The same holds true with life care plans. Personal injury tailored life care planners have a very good understanding of how to cost out injury / trauma specific treatments – whether those be physical therapy, medial branch blocks, radiofrequency ablation procedures, orthopedic surgery; etc. Costing out such therapies / procedures is a sub-specialty in and of itself that takes an expert to not only accurately predict future impairments and disabilities but also to put the correct price tag on those recommendations. I’ve seen many life care planners struggle with understanding how to do this job accurately. Inaccurate life care plans are not taken seriously and set that life care planner up to be dismissed as an expert in your case.
Don’t settle for a “general” life care planner for your cases. Hire an expert personal injury specific life care planner that will help educate plaintiff / defense counsel, and the insurance company. At Injury Reporting Consultants, we specialize in expert reports specifically for personal injury cases such as functional capacity evaluations, vocational and earning capacity evaluations, medical cost projections, and life care plans that effectively communicate to all parties’ the client’s future needs in an accurate and well thought out manner. We believe that a well-crafted life care plan utilizes effective communication and effective communication is key to solving problems.
Dr. Brad Poppie has over 20 years of personal injury experience not only as a treating doctor, but as an expert witness in trial. If you have a client that you would like to discuss their need for an expert report, please contact directly at 720-982-2000 or email: brad@injuryreportingconsultants.com