Glossary: IME record prep and pricing terms
Short version: 22 terms, defined for an IME company comparing record prep services and software. Each term links here from the rest of the site.
Limits: We read each vendor's own pages on 2026-11-12 and did not send any vendor a file, so turnaround and quality here are what vendors publish, not what we measured. Prices change; check the source link in each row before you sign.
What is being bought
- Record prep
- The work between receiving a referral file and the examiner forming an opinion: sorting, removing duplicates, indexing, building a chronology and a summary. Bought from a service or done with software.
- Paper review
- A physician's opinion formed from records alone, without examining the person, sold by IME companies to adjusters and attorneys. Google often shows these for "IME records review", but it is a different purchase from record prep.
- IME company
- A firm that takes exam referrals from carriers, TPAs and attorneys, schedules them with a panel of examiners, and delivers the reports. Also called an IME vendor.
- IME report prep
- A service tier where the vendor builds the report on the examiner's template from the records and the exam dictation, leaving the conclusions to the examiner. NaviCase sells it under this name.
- BPO
- Business process outsourcing: a firm that runs back-office work, such as record review, with its own staff. Several record prep services started as BPOs.
- Human-in-the-loop
- A setup where AI produces a first pass and a person reviews it before delivery. MOS, LevelShift, LezDo and Wisedocs describe their work this way.
What comes back
- Chronology
- A date-ordered list of encounters, findings, tests and treatment from the file, 1 line per event, ideally with the source page.
- Narrative summary
- A prose account of the medical history in the file, shorter than the chronology and organized by theme or period.
- Page citation
- The page number (or a link to the page) behind each entry. It lets the examiner check an entry in seconds instead of searching the file.
- Bookmarking and hyperlinked index
- A PDF with bookmarks or links that jump to each document, so the file can be read in order without scrolling.
- Deduplication
- Finding and setting aside pages that appear more than once, such as the same clinic note produced by 2 providers. Whether duplicates are billed varies by vendor.
- Missing records
- Records the file refers to, such as an MRI report or an operative note, that were not produced. A good deliverable lists them so the IME company can request them before the exam.
- OCR
- Optical character recognition: turning scanned or faxed pages into text a tool can search and read. Poor scans lower OCR quality.
How it is priced and promised
- Turnaround
- Time from sending the file to getting the work product. For services it is usually stated in hours or business days; for software it is processing time, before anyone checks the output.
- Rush fee
- A surcharge for faster delivery. NaviCase adds 25% or 50%; LezDo adds 20% for 24 hours.
- Case minimum
- The least a vendor charges per file, whatever the page count. NaviCase's is $150, or $500 for IME report prep.
- Page allowance
- The pages included in a monthly software plan, such as MediScan's 1,200, 3,500 or 10,000 pages.
- Overage
- The per-page price for pages beyond a monthly allowance, such as $0.05 to $0.10 a page on MediScan's plans.
- Credit pack
- Prepaid pages bought in a block, where bigger blocks lower the per-page price. InPractice and OctopusLM sell them.
- SLA
- Service level agreement: the written turnaround and quality promise in a contract, often with a remedy if it is missed.
Privacy terms
- PHI
- Protected health information: health information that identifies a person. Treat every page of an IME referral file as PHI.
- BAA
- Business associate agreement: the HIPAA contract a vendor signs before it handles PHI for you. Ask for it before the first file moves.