09/22/2026
🔎 INVESTIGATIVE INSIGHT | THE MEDICAL RECORD TELLS YOU WHAT HAPPENED. THE NETWORK MAY TELL YOU WHY.
In Florida personal injury litigation, investigating damages should not necessarily stop with obtaining the claimant’s medical records.
Sometimes the more important questions begin after the provider is identified.
Florida Statute § 768.0427 requires significant disclosures when medical treatment is rendered under a letter of protection, including information concerning the arrangement, medical billing, available health coverage, certain transfers of medical receivables to third parties, and the source of the treatment referral.
Why does that matter from an investigative standpoint?
Because a treatment history can also be a relationship map.
When damages are substantial, defense teams should consider looking beyond the four corners of the medical chart:
🔎 Who referred the claimant to the provider?
🔎 How soon after the loss did treatment begin?
🔎 Were providers added in a predictable sequence?
🔎 Are multiple providers connected through common addresses, ownership, management, business relationships, or referral patterns?
🔎 Was treatment rendered under a letter of protection despite available health coverage?
🔎 Were medical receivables transferred or sold to another entity?
🔎 Does the claimant’s documented treatment history align with other independently developed evidence concerning activity, employment, prior treatment, or reported limitations?
None of those facts standing alone establishes wrongdoing.
Together, however, they can provide critical context for evaluating causation, damages, credibility, treatment patterns, and potential provider bias.
Florida law itself recognizes the significance of some of these relationships. Under § 768.0427, when an attorney refers a claimant for treatment under a letter of protection, the financial relationship between the law firm and medical provider, including the number and frequency of referrals and financial benefit obtained, is relevant to the issue of provider bias.
That changes the investigative question.
It is no longer simply:
“Where did the claimant treat?”
It may also be:
“What connects the people and entities behind that treatment?”
A medical canvass can identify treatment that has not surfaced in the records provided.
Social media intelligence can help establish activity, timing, employment, travel, lifestyle, and other context.
Background and public record research can help identify connections among individuals, providers, businesses, addresses, and entities.
Targeted surveillance can then test claimed functional limitations against documented real world activity.
The strongest investigation does not treat those services as separate assignments.
It connects them.
For adjusters, TPAs, SIU professionals, and defense counsel, the goal is not to manufacture a defense. It is to develop independent facts early enough that those facts can actually influence claim evaluation, discovery strategy, deposition preparation, mediation, and trial.
Because sometimes the most important evidence in a medical record...
is the investigation it tells you to conduct next.
Bona Fide Investigations
Investigative intelligence for claims and litigation professionals
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