Things that Happen at MMI Maintenance Care

Jul 21, 2021 | Employment Concerns

Things that Happen at MMI Maintenance Care – The doctors may tell you that you’re at MMI but you might still need medical care. We’ll discuss the two types of medical care and help you figure the next steps to take care of your work injury.

Things that Happen at MMI Maintenance Care

What is maintenance care?

We’ve been doing a series on Maximum Medical Improvement and we’ve covered what happens when you’re given an impairment rating and we’ve also talked about permanent restrictions for work injuries. Sometimes the doctor will also give an opinion as to whether or not you need maintenance care in order to maintain your condition. But what exactly is maintenance care and why is it so important? Let’s talk about it.

What is treatment like before I reach MMI?

In workers’ compensation, there are two types of medical care. There’s treatment before you reach MMI and then there’s treatment after MMI. The treatment before MMI is to get you back to where you were physically before the work injury.

For example, let’s say before you were injured on the job, you could lift 50 pounds and run a mile in six minutes. But now, you struggle to walk around the block and you can barely lift even five pounds. And so, the workers’ compensation doctors, the therapists, the chiropractors, they’re going to be trying all different kinds of medical care to try and improve your condition.

Will I still be eligible for medical care after MMI?

Once your condition is stable and it no longer progresses towards improvement, the doctors will say, “you’re as good as you can get, you’ve reached MMI.” This statement might panic a lot of people. They might think, “Oh no! That means I can’t get any further medical care.” But rest assured, that’s not the case. You still have a right to ongoing medical care but it’s called maintenance care. The purpose of maintenance care is to help maintain your condition or to stop you from getting worse.

Often you might get ongoing prescriptions, sometimes gym memberships, or ongoing chiropractic care. You could even need hardware removal for certain kinds of surgeries. Braces, tens units, and more are all possible forms of maintenance recommendations from your treating physician. When you’re placed at Maximum Medical Improvement, it’s really important to have that discussion with your authorized treating physician to ask “What would you recommend for me to maintain my condition? What medications, gym memberships, chiropractic, tens units, other sorts of units that will help me?”

Why is maintenance care so important?

If your doctor has prescribed something for you to maintain your condition, it’s important to do it right away. This is because the insurance company has to pay for reasonable and necessary maintenance care until it’s no longer reasonable, no longer necessary, and no longer related to your work injury. If you hesitate to get maintenance care, the insurance company will stop providing it.