Portal still needs bedding in, say MIB and Medco bosses as 115,000 claims await medical reports

Latest data from OIC portal shows that 280,172 claims have been submitted into the portal since it launched in May 2021, of which liability decision has been made on 174,548 and 34,548 have been settled. Meaning there are around 70,885 claims which are waiting for liability decision, and 140,191 claims awaiting settlement.

However, according to Clayden, of the claims that had the liability accepted, 115,000 are awaiting medical reports, which could be contributing to the delay in settling claims.

According to the latest portal data, the average time from claim to settlement has increased from 139 to 175 days.

Clayden told Post that without medical report, insurers cannot make offers.

He explained that there are a number of claims that come on the system, then the insurance company will make a decision on a liability and the claim will “go off onto a separate branch on the flowchart to Medco for medical report”.

Clayden explained that the data collected from the OIC portal is presented as a flowchart showing where people are in the process.

He continued: “What we see is they go off to [a Medco] branch [for medical report], and the next step is when either litigants in person or the lawyers submit the report back into our process and at that point it gets given to insurance company and it proceeds down the line of ‘okay how much is this worth?’ or ‘is there going to be an offer’.

“What we noticed is that it goes off the branch line to Medco but it isn’t coming back in.”

However, Clayden pointed out he is not aware of what is causing the issue, but “from our view it’s not a medical reporting issue, it’s somewhere else in that branch and we don’t know what that is”.

No issue at Medco

Heskins confirmed there is no evidence of any delays from Medco’s point of view.

He said: “Our data shows there’s no apparent problem that is causing delays. 94% of Medco searches and selections are made by representative claimants, that tallies with the OIC figures.”

Heskins added there is “probably somewhere in the region of 80,000 reports which have yet to be uploaded” but stressed that this could be anything from search and selection made today where medical experts “hasn’t even been instructed”.

He said: “We allow six months minimum for the process to take place and that figure remains virtually constant, there’s always that number of medical reports – it’s not unusual”

He added that this number is not contributing to the 100,000 cases awaiting medical report in the OIC portal.

Clayden agreed: “From my working assumption this isn’t anything to do with the commissioning of the report, or the medical reports coming in.

“What we’re keen to understand from people is what is the process from the claimant, or the claimant representative having the medical report in their hands and what’s going on in that process between getting the medical report and filing it back onto the system for the compensator to make an offer.”

Time to get used to it

Both Haskins and Clayden pointed out that the original claims portal took a while to “bed in” and for people to “get used to it and work through it” and they expect the same could be the case for the OIC portal.

Clayden said: “We’ve got to give people time to learn how to do it all the way through. There is an element, certainly from what we’ve heard anecdotally, of people waiting for the mixed injury issue to get resolved.

“While we’re not directly involved in that we are supporting the claimant group and insurers in that process, and we are starting to see they are getting closer to having a group of cases they can take to the court of appeal to get that issue resolved.

“That would assist in people really understanding what the right level of compensation is for somebody, because I do appreciate if you are a compensator, you are not sure you are making the right offer and if you are representative then giving advice is tricky.”

“There could be loads of things driving this, but I can certainly say this is not a medical reporting issue.”