Resource
Medical chronology: what it is and what to demand from one
A medical chronology is a dated, provider-organized index of a record set. Each entry states one fact and points to its page. It is not a summary and it is not an opinion.
What firms use it for
- Case evaluation. The first honest look at what the records support.
- Demand packages. The factual spine a demand letter is written over.
- Deposition and trial preparation. Finding, in seconds, every entry touching a date, provider, or treatment, with the page ready to show.
- Spotting the gaps. Dates where treatment stops, providers who appear once, and pages the production never included.
The quality bar
One property separates a working chronology from a decorative one: citation, every entry cited to its page. Everything else follows from it:
- Verifiability in minutes. Spot-checking ten random entries against their pages should take ten minutes, not an afternoon.
- Facts in the source’s own words. An entry quotes what the page says, dated by what the page prints.
- Declared boundaries. A serious chronology states what it did NOT process. Pages too degraded to read, entries refused for want of a citation, pages never delivered.
- A human in the loop, visibly. The question is whether a person reviewed the output, and whether the vendor can show what it covered.
Red flags, in order of severity
- Uncited entries. If you cannot get from a statement to its page, the chronology is asking for trust it has not earned.
- No account of unreadable pages. A chronology that never mentions any is not reporting its blind spots.
- Completeness measured by page count. “You gave us 1,412 pages and we processed 1,412 pages” says nothing about the pages the custodian never sent. The production’s own stamp numbering and page footers do. See how to find missing pages.
- Medical or legal conclusions. A chronology that diagnoses, opines on causation, or argues the case has left clerical ground.
Build or buy
Building in-house costs staff time and recurs with every supplemental production (the arithmetic). Buying costs money. Either way the demand list is the same. Cited to the page? Verifiable in minutes? Boundaries declared? Reviewed by a person who signs it?
Claracord produces chronologies to that bar. Every fact linked to its source page, unreadable and refused pages reported, missing pages as a lower bound. A person reviews the work before it ships.
A complete sample is on the home page: chronology, Bates-stamped record set, completeness report. Synthetic demo case.