Medical Reporting in 2017, The Year of Innovation?

MedCo has seen little evidence of the mature, fit for purpose Medico-Legal sector that industry has spent so many years portraying to both government and the market in general. Calculated disruption to both randomisation and the accreditation process have failed to achieve the antagonists’ goal of making MedCo last as long the HIP packs did in conveyancing. And there appears to be little retreat in these tactics following the recent belated implementation of the review, with emergency meetings and rumours of calls for refunds for the shell companies, despite three public statements during the summer that none would be given.

Whilst I would admit that some aspects of the guidance on the new criteria require clarification, there are significant aspects which support randomisation, fragmentation and appear to level the playing field. Any form of group marketing is clearly banned, but this comes hand in hand with the prevention of Tier 1 companies with shared common ownership from having the same client markets. This clearly prevents double dipping with the same customers.

The challenge for progressive MROs in 2017 is to offer instructing parties the ability to work with 40- 50 MROs in any given year, whilst remaining a fully autonomous organisation, deciding which expert to use for any given case, but at the same time making the customer journey for their clients as simple as possible within this randomised world.

Looking back at our own short journey, we are proud that those MROs we have accredited have respected the rules of autonomy, and enhanced their reputations over the past 18 months as respected small businesses, many of whom have surpassed the service offered by Tier 1 MROs when independently benchmarked against them.

My own opinion is that the sector needs to look towards innovation of the type that took us forward in the first decade of this century. Far from the rhetoric that adorned the Association of Medical Reporting Organisation’s board meetings 10 years ago that WARP and other report writing software, 'devalued what we do', it has been shown that this and other advances have hugely enhanced the procurement of medical evidence.

If the market genuinely wants good independent medical evidence, then it will now embrace the fragmentation that randomisation brings, rather than fight it. It will look to new operational and technological innovation so that Instructing Parties can have the confidence to instruct multiple suppliers in the knowledge that their cases will be handled diligently and in the most operationally efficient way for them and their clients when using 50 MROs and not one or two. This is the challenge that we have focused on since the announcement of MedCo and is one that we, and we hope others, will continue to relish moving into 2017.

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