In the Loop – Vol. 25 | November 2025

QA Insights

Compiling Briefs to Medical Specialists:

Quality over Quantity

Putting together a brief to a medico-legal specialist is something of a balancing act. It can be tempting to compile every existing record, to ensure that the specialist doesn’t miss a thing. While this approach yields a very thorough background, it may also result in a brief that is large, costly, and filled with irrelevant information – which may take focus away from the subject incident.

In my role as a Quality Assurance Officer at VERIFY, I often encounter excellent briefs to specialists, and have found that such briefs tend to be compiled with the following factors in mind:

Great briefs include comprehensive information on the claimant’s history, relevant to the expert’s specialty:

Different specialties will require different records. For example, a brief to:

● an orthopaedic surgeon would include pre-injury X-rays, or incident forms from previous accidents; whereas

● a brief to a psychiatrist may include school counsellor records, or treatment records from the claimant’s psychologist.

These briefs paint a clear picture of the claimant’s health both before and after the subject incident.

Quality briefs include only medical records of relevance . . .

Successful briefs keep the scope of the records within the specialist’s area of interest; an orthopaedic specialist will not find much value in psychology records, and a psychiatric specialist will not gain much insight from physiotherapy records. These briefs are compiled with the requirements of the specialist in mind.

. . . and trim records, as necessary

Great briefs will often remove unnecessary pages from records. Depending on the specialist, these can include redacted, or badly photocopied pages, as well as hospital nursing records, medical certificates, ECG’s, imaging scans, pathology records, invoices, and photographs.

Great briefs exclude duplicated records

Duplicates are often the biggest cause of a confusing or oversized brief.

Many treating doctors will keep all of the claimant’s available records from emergency services, hospitals, specialists and general practitioner clinics on file. It is often the case that when the medical records are requested from these treating doctors, they include these documents; meaning records are duplicated multiple times within a brief.

In great briefs, these duplicate records are removed, creating a clear, concise, and easy to follow brief to the specialist.

Key takeaways

Checking your brief material against these guidelines before sending it to the specialist can improve the turnaround time of your report, ensure the relevance of the material provided, and save money by reducing the overall time the specialist spends reading the material.