Will: Hello Female speaker: Good afternoon, welcome to the hospital.
Will: Thanks, my name's Will - I'm here to pick up some medical records. I'm from the agency.
Female speaker: Well, do you have your release form?
Will: Yeah, I faxed that over a few days ago along with an 827.
Female speaker: What's an 827?
Will: It's a release form that Social Security uses. If I send it to you guys it means that I can re-release it to Social Security later on.
Female speaker: Oh, I need to check my supervisor, I hope you understand.
Will: Oh, sure, yeah. Female speaker: OK
Hi, I've got Will here from the agency and he's looking for some medical records...OK...sure.
Well, everything appears to be in order, she says it's fine.
So, what is this SOAR stuff anyway?
SOAR is all about just assisting with applications and increasing access to social security disability.
So, yeah, medical evidence is really the heart of the process,
so you guys are so important in getting us this information, it really helps a lot.
You might see me or some of my staff pretty frequently
because we're gonna be assisting with applications a lot
Perfect, thank you so much!
Female speaker: You're welcome, have a nice day. Will: You, too.
Female speaker: Come back soon!
Kristin: So, these medical records have been coming in really well,
and so I think we've got just about everything we're gonna need.
So we have some records from clinics that he has been to,
and the hospitals, and really we've got pretty good coverage of
both his mental health and physical health.
Will: Hey, Dr. Mertz, this is Will. I've been looking through Bones' medical records and I haven't seen
a mental status exam, and I think Social Security might want one in the last 90 days.
So I was wondering if you could maybe fit Bones into your schedule if we can get him over there one day.
Dr. Mertz: Yes, absolutely, but I may have done a mental status report
at a recent checkup with him.
Will: Just let me know and, if not, you know, I can try to get Bones there whenever you're available.
Kristin: So, his last diagnosis was schizophrenia and major depression.
We can see his medications have stayed the same
So, if we look over here at the hospital...
Last time he went in the hospital he was having complications from his diabetes and, so he was,
the ulcers on his legs were bothering him, and the edema was really making it hard for him to walk.
So, when we kind of write about this in the Medical Summary,
we want to make sure that we point out that these conditions
are making it hard for him to stand for a long period of time,
to kind of walk around, get to places he needs to go.
You remember talking with Matt, his former supervisor,
he said that he wasn't able to stand on the job anymore,
that sort of thing. So we would wanna tie that all together.
Will: So we want to cover both physical and mental health, and Social Securty wants to look at both.
Kristin: Yeah, absolutely. So someone can get approved based on a combination of illnesses,
so we don't want to just look at one or the other, what we think is most severe.
We wanna let them know about everything that's affecting him.
A person can't be approved for disability benefits with a diagnosis alone.
What we really have to show Social Security
is that there's a functional impairment connected to that illness.
So we have to show the illness, diagnosis, or condition,
the functional impairment that results from that illness,
and the person's inability to work because of it.
Will: It mentions alcohol abuse a lot in the medical records, so how should we handle that?
Kristin: So what we'll need to show for Social Security is that
his substance use isn't material to the disabilities,
so, that, he would still struggle with his,
with hearing voices, he would still experience the depression that he does,
whether he was drinking or not.
Will: Seems like it'd be tough to do,
kind of separate those two out from each other.
Kristin: It's definitely hard to separate them, and that's why we have to
spend some time in the Medical Summary Report
talking about his alcohol use and to really try to tease that out for them.