When a Social Security Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) sends a claimant out for a medical examination at Social Security's expense, called a Consultative Examination (CE), typically the ALJ sends some part of the claimant's medical records along as background information. I have heard from a well placed source that ALJs across the country have recently been told informally that they are limited to a certain number of pages of medical records they can send to the CE physician. Some have been told that they are limited to ten or twenty pages. This is problematic since ten or twenty pages may not be nearly enough to give the CE physician enough background on the claimant.
6 comments:
This isn't anything new to me. When I worked as an adjudicator, we were told to send no more than 15 pages of medical records to the CE physician. That was years ago.
I provide copies of the critical medical records to the client to "hand carry" in these circumstances. I do not depend on the ALJ.
15 pages is the limit
Page limits set indeed, on DDS insistence I understand. Some times requested exhibits simply not sent. DDS practicing law and medicine I reckon.
Also, CE's done at the DDS level (pre-ALJ) appear pretty routinely to be done w/o medical records. Pretty useless for our purposes needless to say.
A judge.
It's almost impossible to get any records into the hands of the CE physician through DDS. They simply won't send them.
I usually ask the rep to equip the claimant with appropriate records to take to the CE doc. I'm pretty sure that they don't read them though. They won't get paid for it.
Another judge.
I can only speak from my experience. When I worked as an adjudicator at DDS, we were limited to sending 15 pages of records, however, we were REQUIRED to send at least some medical evidence to the CE provider. They would not schedule the CE unless we had prepared medical evidence to go along with the scheduling information to the CE doctor.
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