New Jersey Life Care Planning Expert Services

A New Jersey life care plan sets out the future medical and non-medical needs of a person with a catastrophic injury or a chronic condition, item by item, across the person's remaining life expectancy, and prices each item for the region where the person lives. The needs are drawn from the medical record and the treating providers' recommendations: physician follow-up, therapies, medications, diagnostic testing, durable medical equipment and supplies, home modification, transportation, attendant care and case management, and the surgeries or procedures the record anticipates. Each item states its frequency, its duration and its cost basis, so that the plan can be read line by line and every line traced to the record or the standard that supports it. The plan is the foundation of the claim for future care: the economist takes its items and reduces them to present value, and the vocational opinion, where there is one, addresses the earning capacity the injury left.

Plans are prepared by the roster's certified life care planners with physician support for the items that fall within the scope of medical practice, and the planners who prepare each plan are named on the life care planning practice page rather than here. The work runs from the records to the plan: the medical record is reviewed and a chronology of diagnoses, treatment and current status is built; the evaluee and family are interviewed and treating providers consulted where the assignment calls for it; future needs are projected in line with published life care planning standards; and each item is priced and its basis documented in the written plan. The plan is revised when the clinical picture or the records change, and deposition and trial testimony on it follow the case calendar.

Life care evidence is offered in New Jersey wherever the cost of future care is in dispute. In the Law Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey it is offered in personal injury and medical malpractice actions, including traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury cases; before the New Jersey Division of Workers' Compensation, where the future medical needs of an injured worker are contested, the plan speaks to those needs and their cost; and in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey it is offered in the federal matters that carry a claim for future care. The Superior Court sits by county vicinage, and the New Jersey state page lists the vicinages and their courthouses.

Pricing follows the evaluee's region. Each item is priced from cost research for the region where the person lives, provider and supplier pricing and published fee data, and the plan states which region it priced to and why, so that the price of a therapy visit or an hour of attendant care can be checked against the market the person will buy it in. The written plan is organized to the disclosure requirements of the forum, with its method, its sources and each recommendation documented, so that an opposing planner can reproduce it and challenge it on the merits. Attorneys confirm the governing rule for their case. KWVRS prepares its New Jersey life care plans from its Hackensack headquarters. Plaintiff and defense.