One of the more perplexing decisions to make as a claimant’s attorney is where to advise your client to medically treat within the first 90 days following a work injury. Most people who have some tangential relationship with the workers’ compensation system, such as human resource directors or attorneys who do not practice workers’ compensation, will reflexively conclude that the injured worker must stay in “panel care” for the first 90 days. There is, perhaps, no area of workers’ compensation law subject to greater misunderstanding than that dealing with so-called “company doctors.”
The requirement that an injured worker treat with a panel physician is governed by Section 306(f.1)(1)(i) of the Workers’ Compensation Act. The section provides a series of rules in setting up a “panel,” which is simply a number of doctors selected either by the employer or the insurer with whom an injured worker is supposed to treat following a work injury. In at least 90 percent of all cases, the employer follows almost none of these rules.
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