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How An IME Firm Created Customized Medical Records Packages
CASE STUDY
Jennise Ortiz, Integral Consulting
Client Coordinator Supervisor | IME & Peer Review
Jennise Ortiz is the Client Coordination Supervisor at Integral Consulting Services, with 26 years of experience in the IME and peer review business. She leads Integral’s Medical Records and Report Retrieval teams and works across no-fault and workers’ comp files.
On the Medical Records side, Jennise is responsible for ensuring every file is sorted, indexed, and ready for the reviewing physician.
The Challenge
Jennise has seen firsthand how medical record preparation has changed, from paper files to digital platforms. Early on, she copied and scanned pages from insurance companies, and with the shift to electronic records, she began sorting them electronically. In recent years, she started working with record review platforms, and today her team uses SiftMed.
“A file that’s 500+ pages takes time to sort,” Jennise explains, “and that time delays getting the record over to the doctor’s office, and again if records are missing or files get added later.” With practice, Jennise can check a file at a glance, but manually sorting large files is repetitive and time-consuming.
Physicians often want their records presented in a specific way, so Jennise’s team adjusts the file’s index to fit that physician’s preferences before sending it over. With some record review tools, modifying the table of contents isn’t easy. Jennise says that with one tool she used, each change meant sending the file back and waiting 24-48 hours for a new version, which delayed its review.
With SiftMed
SiftMed is a medical record review platform that organizes, analyzes and extracts key information from medical records. Integral’s team uses SiftMed to turn incoming records into review-ready files. SiftMed puts the records in chronological order, flags possible duplicates and builds an index for each file, with each entry linking straight to its document.
“To be able to rearrange documents in a table of contents or edit details at any moment is a huge game changer in my eyes.”
Jennise’s team can easily adjust any file before it gets sent to the physician’s office. The team can rearrange documents into the order a physician prefers and hide documents that don’t belong, and they populate the index to match.
“If you prepare the file a specific way, that’s exactly how it’s going to show when you export it,” Jennise says. Where a change used to mean sending the file back and waiting, her team can now make edits on the spot.
When SiftMed flags a possible duplicate, Jennise opens both documents in the side-by-side duplicates view and locks them in place so they scroll in sync, letting her compare the pages top to bottom.
“SiftMed has so many features, and there are few that we can't alter in some way if we need to, which is truly fantastic.”
Built For Each IME
When the Medical Records team needs a more customized format, Jennise works with SiftMed to configure a template to match. Jennise shared, “If I need a table of contents in a specific way, the SiftMed team is so accommodating.”
Integral Consulting Services recently recruited a physician in Colorado for a file with a tight deadline, and the physician asked for the records to be sorted in a very specific order. SiftMed helped Jennise configure the format and the change was applied to the file right away. In Jennise’s role, meeting a reviewing-physician’s exact requirements makes a real difference. The physician’s feedback came straight back to her: “She emailed me and said the medical records and table of contents is perfect.”
The Impact
With SiftMed, Integral Consulting Services sends files out for review faster. Jennise shared that SiftMed has significantly reduced file turnaround, which has opened up her time for the Retrieval team: working directly with providers to obtain IME reports, peer reviews, and addendums.
The benefits of SiftMed carry through to the physicians who review Integral Consulting Services files. “You want the records to be as clean and clear as possible for the doctor.” When records arrive in a standardized format that the physician expects, they know where to look and spend less time searching the file and can move straight to writing their report.
Jennise comments, “Our doctors are not sifting through medical records and trying to piece together the events. The records are organized in the way they need. For the doctors to be able to turnaround a report quickly because of that, makes the use of SiftMed 10 times better.”
“SiftMed has changed us in a sense where our team is able to customize our medical records package with our table of contents, and expedite our turnaround time when it comes to sending things out to the providers.”
See how SiftMed helps IME firms quickly customize their output.
