How a Life Care Planner Uses SiftMed to Compare Case Details

CASE STUDY

Dan Bravard, Buckeye Medical Legal Consulting

RN | Life Care Planner | Legal Nurse Consulting

Dan Bravard is a Registered Nurse (RN) with over 40 years of clinical experience. In recent years, he has transitioned into the medical-legal field, specializing in Legal  Nurse Consulting and Life Care Planning. Dan works with attorneys throughout Ohio and the United States, working across both sides of litigation - developing comprehensive life care plans for plaintiffs and providing expert review and analysis of existing plans for the defense.

"SiftMed has saved hours and hours of prep time for my reports. Before, a case might take 6-8 hours depending on file size, now it’s down to a couple of hours."

In every case, the outcome relies on the medical records. Dan is responsible for reviewing and extracting the data that supports a well-reasoned, defensible plan - a process that, before SiftMed, was entirely manual and deeply time-consuming.

The Challenge

Medical records almost never arrive in any logical order. For Dan, a single case might contain dozens of disorganized documents running hundreds or even thousands of pages.

"Records were never in order, everything was in disarray," Dan explains, "I could have 50 files, and there might be something in there that I need, so I have to sift through all of that information."

A typical review, depending on file size, would take Dan anywhere from six to eight hours. Scanning through pages looking for specific clinical details - office visits and frequency, billing patterns, procedure history - was not only time-consuming, it left room for things to be overlooked.

With SiftMed

It didn’t take long after Dan started using SiftMed to see the value in his process. SiftMed's ability to organize records into chronological order addressed one of his biggest frustrations from the start.

"I've always thought linearly - from start to finish - and before, you'd just get a file at random out of 50, and you're jumping back and forth trying to establish a timeline. It was like trying to read a book from the middle, to the back, then back to the first chapter.” says Dan.

SiftMed's chronology gave Dan the structured view he needed to trace the full story and identify key details across the records.

Where Dan had to manually scan thousands of pages just to track down a single detail, like how many physical therapy visits the patient had, SiftMed finds it for him. SiftMed doesn’t just find the number of visits; it breaks down the information further, providing additional detail, and Dan’s favourite part is that SiftMed links every finding directly back to the source page.

Dan shared, “I used to have to jump back and forth across a case to find the right record and the right page, now SiftMed just takes me right into what I need.”

As Dan grew more familiar with the platform, he began using it in new ways. Now, once he’s finished building a care plan, he uses SiftMed to compare and cross reference data - comparing office visits against billing statements to catch discrepancies. SiftMed helps Dan identify gaps in the medical record that might have gone unnoticed otherwise, finding patterns that weren’t visible before.

“As soon as I started using it, I knew SiftMed would be a time-saver. And I’m learning more as I go, I can use it to compare data and uncover details that were hard to catch before."

More recently, Dan has started exploring Sifty, SiftMed's AI assistant. He describes Sifty as context-aware and thorough, it remembers what was asked in previous queries and proactively surfaces related information he hadn't started looking for. In one example, Dan mentioned Sifty went beyond a single query result to flag related terminology that might be relevant to the initial task, a level of depth Dan hadn't expected.

The Impact

What was once a six-to-eight-hour review process is now down to a couple of hours. For an independent practitioner like Dan, that’s not just efficiency, it directly impacts how many cases he can take on and how deeply he can engage with each one.

"The biggest benefit is time and efficiency. The two go hand in hand, but I find myself being a lot more efficient. I can zero in on exactly what I need."

Beyond speed, SiftMed has expanded what's possible in a review - enabling Dan to more easily uncover discrepancies, spot documentation gaps, and identify record patterns that simply weren't visible before.

Dan's advice to others considering a tool is straightforward: be patient, and give it a real chance. “It’s like learning how to use any other tool, you need to give it a try and figure out what it can do. The more I use SiftMed, the more I see how much it can do. It’s unlike any other tool I’ve used before.”

See how SiftMed transforms the life care planning and legal nurse review process.

Request a Demo