Getting ordered by your insurance company to go and attend an IME is scary because you may be poked and prodded by a doctor whose interest is not the same as yours. In fact he or she is getting paid by the PIP (personal injury protection) insurance company. IME’s are not independent and trial lawyers and injury lawyers like me call them defense medical exams.

Should you go to the IME exam? If you do not attend an IME scheduled exam the pip will cut off pip benefits. If you attend a IME you also risk having the IME doctor generate a negative IME report that could deep six your injury case against the responsible driver.

More and more we see IME’s closer and closer to the mva accident date. IME’s within three month’s following a crash in the state of Oregon and Washington are now much more common.

One benefit of having an injury lawyer on your side is that the pip carrier insurance agent may be more hesitant to send you to an IME in the first place. When my injury clients get an IME notice my practice calls the pip carrier and attempts to cancel it.

A final note on IME exams is always make sure the IME doctor is credentialed the same as your treating doctor. An example is if you have a chiropractor than the IME doctor should be a chiropractor, same as an orthopedic or other medical personal.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Oregon Accident Law, Injuries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.