New direct medical expert service promises to return a much higher proportion of report fees to doctors

A new group representing medical experts has launched an administration outsourcing service for doctors who are registered as direct medical experts with MedCo, promising them an estimated 75% return of the cost of a medical report, while providing a “first class administration service” to personal injury solicitors.

The not-for-profit Association of Direct Medical Experts (ADME) wants to remove the extra layer of expense found in the current MRO model through a cloud-based service called D2Expert.

ADME also says that D2Expert will solve two major problems that have plagued the MedCo portal to date – the amount of time being wasted by law firms in having to set up contracts with multiple suppliers, and MROs referring claimants to experts who are located more than a reasonable distance away from where they live.

Explaining the appeal of D2Expert to doctors, Dr Sahir Shaikh, a founding member, said: “Experts are currently seeing only a trickle of work coming through the DME path on the MedCo portal due to the historic lack of ability for experts to provide a cohesive set of terms and conditions and service level standards, yet we are all providing the core service standards required through MROs, but receiving less than 25% of the fee. D2Expert will, as a not-for-profit foundation, return an estimated 75% of the remuneration to experts, whilst providing a first class administration service to the legal community.”

The newly formed ADME has two non-executive board members in Dr Jan Wise and Chris Worsfold. Both are currently serving as MedCo board members. Dr David Pearce, a past chairman of AMRO and the co-founder of Qualitas Medical Assurance, will serve as the ADME’s inaugural medical director.

“D2Expert is the coming together of three major forces within the evolution of medical reporting,” said Pearce.

“The efficiencies through the use of cloud based technology; the commoditisation of the reporting process by large companies who have not respected the contribution of the core supplier of the service; and the implementation of MedCo by the Government, which in itself recognises the overall deep-rooted issues within the sector.

“If a solicitor wants a report for his/her client provided by a local expert through a high quality administration and expert network that performs to agreed service standards and payment terms, with a single point of integration and portal view of all of their cases, then there is now only one option and that’s the DME route using D2Expert.

“Let MedCo do the randomisation and let D2Expert provide the right standard of administration.”

D2Expert has already signed up direct medical experts registered on MedCo, which it says will allow it to offer the instructing party a greater than 96% chance of being able to use its co-operative service when it goes live to portal users in August.

It is now open for registration to all other direct medical experts.

Mark Dugdale