Life care planners help injured patients and families develop a long-term plan for their life when faced with disability or a serious injury. Life care professionals require a tremendous amount of compassion—the reason so many of them come from nursing, rehabilitation, and other health-related fields.  Life care planners rely on information from the field in order to make the best long-term care plans. In this case, that means medical documentation and records as it pertains to the patient.

Accidents and injuries cost the US $4.2 trillion in 2019.  Not all of these accidents were serious, however, the staggering total does provide some context to the life-altering changes that go with an accident or injury. When injuries or accidents happen, patients need someone both knowledgeable about the physical requirements associated with their injury as well as someone with the skill to create an effective and manageable plan. This is where Certified Life Care Planners come in. 

What does a Certified Life Care Planner Do?

From medical records and insurance reports to healthcare assessments or power of attorney, the life care planner deals with plenty of paperwork. In addition to spending enough time with the patient or family to understand their needs, they start mapping out a plan for the future, using the patient’s available income, finding support, or consulting with other professionals such as a benefits attorney. 

All of this forms the flexible, dynamic job of the certified life care planner, who, after meeting with the family and gaining an understanding of their situation, needs to act fast. The patient or their family needs to know their life care planner is acting in their best interests in order to get the systems in place to prevent further deterioration of care. Patient’s financial obligations are sometimes more than the family can handle, so additional benefits, leaves, or assets need to be applied for, sold, claimed through insurance, or received.

Medical records and the paperwork of planning

Like insurance, the healthcare profession is often one of the more risk-averse industries. Sitting at the nexus of risk management and patient care, certified life care planners may be inherently wary of innovative tech. However, as artificial intelligence starts to move beyond concept and into iteration,the technology solutions that have come out of it are something the life care industry needs for growth and change. 

Faster review of medical records by life care planners means quicker creation of a Life Care Plan, more options, and a better outcome for both patients and families under their care. With AI, thousands of pages of paperwork can be processed up to 70% faster: not by relying on computerized pseudo-humans, but by having machines do the manual workload of professionals in a fraction of the time. 

Documents such as medical records can be indexed, organized, pared of duplicates, and have summarization and insights generated with artificial intelligence (AI). All of this work pieces together the story of the patient’s injury, readies the documentation needed and acquired for further insurance, medical, or legal investigation, and informs the planner of the case. 

With AI-generated medical records, life care planners can more quickly review these documents, skip the manual workload, and spend more of their time seeing the individuals in their care. Rehabilitation specialists, physicians, or other health care professionals—who make up the bulk of certified life care planners—are motivated by patient outcomes and the meaning in their work. Physicians who focus on core values of compassion, service, and reverence for life find more meaning and less burnout in their job.

Life care planning at the speed of AI

While it may seem to be a leap to go from expedited paperwork to a longer, more meaningful career, consider that paperwork is a chief complaint of healthcare workers worldwide. By eliminating the most time consuming manual processes of the job with AI tools, life care planners can get a jump on the task, as well as their work-life balance. 

“Wisedocs is the best platform for Life Care Planners looking to speed up the medical record review process,” says Karishma Shah, Client Success Manager at Wisedocs. “By leveraging our state-of-the-art machine learning platform to summarize and index records, Life Care Planners can move cases through the process with ease and get claimants the closure and support they need.”

Automating manual processes in jobs with tech isn’t just a nice-to-have, according to the Harvard Business Review, it’s a must-have. To tackle more medical record files in cases, life care planners need the technology to make sure they can give the right attention to each one. This means streamlining their workflows, and in 2023, the best way to do it is by integrating technology that enables streamlining. 

“Having spoken to Life Care Planners about how they use medical records in their processes, I know we can really add value to their workflows,” Karishma adds. When claimants get the right kind of closure and support—and life care planners can spend more time on each case in a meaningful way—it’s a win-win scenario, even in a tough emotional time.