Massachusetts Life Care Planning Services

A Massachusetts life care plan answers two questions for the forum: what care the injured person will need for the rest of his or her life, and what that care will cost in the person's own area. It is built from the medical record and the recommendations of the treating providers, lists each item of care the person will need, from medical follow-up, therapy, medication and testing to equipment, home and vehicle modification, transportation, personal care attendants and case management, with the procedures the record anticipates, and states for each item how often it recurs, for how long and what its price rests on. Every line traces to the record or to a published life care planning standard and is written for the forensic economist who reduces it to present value.

The Superior Court's page describes a trial court with general jurisdiction whose justices sit in courthouses in every county; the personal injury and medical malpractice actions in which a plan is served are heard there, and the page adds that this court has exclusive authority to convene medical malpractice tribunals. The page of the Probate and Family Court names divorce, child support, guardianship and conservatorship among the matters it hears, and a plan is offered there when a child's or a disabled adult's future care is part of the support or guardianship question. In the federal system the District of Massachusetts lists divisional offices at Boston, Worcester and Springfield, with the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse in Boston. The Massachusetts Appeals Court reviews the trial courts' decisions, and the Commonwealth's Supreme Judicial Court sits above it as the highest appellate court.

At the Department of Industrial Accidents an injured worker's contested future medical treatment and its cost are what the plan addresses. The department's own page has it overseeing the state's workers' compensation system; its main office is in Boston, and its page lists offices elsewhere in the Commonwealth. Its page on the dispute resolution steps lists conciliation, then a conference, then a hearing, terms the hearing the trial phase of the case and says witnesses are called there, and routes an appealed hearing decision to its Reviewing Board; the Appeals Court, on its own page, counts Industrial Accident Board decisions among the appeals it hears. A conference-stage plan summarizes the contested treatment and its basis; a hearing plan carries every item with its source, since that is the step at which the planner may be called as a witness.

Plans are prepared by the roster's certified life care planners with physician support for the items within the scope of medical practice; the planners and the physicians behind each plan are named, with their credentials, on the life care planning practice page. The work runs in one order: the medical record is read and a chronology built; the evaluee and family are interviewed and the treating providers consulted where the assignment calls for it; the future needs are projected to published life care planning standards and priced; and the written plan documents the basis for every recommendation. When new records arrive or the clinical picture changes, the plan is revised and served again.

Pricing follows the person's region: provider and supplier quotes and published fee data for the area the person lives in, with the region named so that each price can be set beside what that market charges. For a person in Boston or the cities and towns around it, the hourly lines for attendant care, home health and case management are also read against the occupational wages the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes through its OEWS program, whose metropolitan area estimates list the Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH area; a resident of another part of the Commonwealth is priced to the bureau's area for that place, and the plan records the area it used.

The written plan follows the expert disclosure practice of the forum hearing the matter; testimony on it at deposition and trial is scheduled around the dates the case sets. Plaintiff and defense are given the same plan, from the same record. Attorneys confirm the governing rule for their case. KWVRS works with attorneys nationwide from its New Jersey, Virginia and Rhode Island offices.