California Medical records
We asked Dorit what types of medical records are needed in California birth injury cases and who obtains them? He told us that, “Generally speaking, my office obtains all of the medical records because we have a targeted approach to getting exactly the records that we need in order to evaluate the case. Hospital records are complex and difficult to interpret. Sometimes clients come to us with records, which is always helpful, but even in those cases we will independently order the medical records to make sure that we have a complete and correct set of records.”
Dorit says that the records' unique identifiers in an obstetrical or birth injury case are records that would never appear in a chart in other kinds of cases, such as the fetal heart monitoring strip, which is a printout of the baby’s heart rate juxtaposed with the mother’s labor pattern. He explained:
We look at the entire prenatal chart on the mother to see if there are any genetic issues and whether an amniocentesis was done. We look very carefully at the labor and delivery notes, particularly the nurses’ and doctors’ notes to see if they were communicating with each other and appreciated what was on the fetal monitoring strips. We will look at the neonatal records to make assessments as to the timing of the injury sometimes based upon the child’s status and laboratory results in the first few hours or the first day of life.Sometimes we have a pathologist look at the placenta to help address why the baby is injured and when the injury occurred. So, we very carefully target specific categories of records and know what we’re looking for, whereas a patient may just walk in with a random set of records that the Hospital provided – but which don’t contain what we need.
California Medical experts
Experts are a critical feature of these cases, according to Dorit, who routinely hires a team of top notch experts in their respective fields, including obstetricians and people with sub-specialties within obstetrics, which are doctors that deal primarily with the birthing phase of obstetrics called perinatologists. He continued:
They are highly credentialed, well-recognized among their peers in the community and very objective in judging other doctors’ behavior. They're not there to shield or provide excuses, nor are they there particularly to criticize, but just to look at what the conduct was and to determine if it did, or did not, meet the standard of care. They'll also look at the first few hours or days of the baby’s life.We also consult with pediatricians called neonatologists who look at the baby's first 30 days of life or young children who seem to be ok at birth and then, for whatever reason, have catastrophic injuries from an infection that was not properly diagnosed or treated when the child was a newborn. As these cases progress, we often hire rehabilitation doctors, pediatric neurologists, economists, life care planners and obstetrical nurses.
Experienced birth injury attorneys say that a careful review of the right records and using the right experts really are critical aspects in these cases as multi-million verdicts and settlements are not uncommon.