Do I Have to Go to Concentra After a Work Injury in DC?
Can My Employer Force Me to Go to Concentra After a Work Injury in DC?
No, you do not have to go to Concentra if you’re hurt at work in Washington, DC. You have an absolute right to choose your own physician. Your employer and a lot of workers’ compensation insurance companies will try to send you to one of their clinics or doctors for treatment.
But you are not required to go to Concentra—or anywhere else your job, HR, or the workers’ comp insurance nurse tells you to go.
Most of these clinics and doctors that the insurance company and employers send people to get all of their patients from construction companies, large corporations, and workers’ comp insurance companies. Whose interest do you think these medical providers have?
Probably isn’t yours.
Plus, these workers’ clinics are usually staffed with general practice doctors and healthcare providers. They do not have specialists and cannot treat serious orthopedic and neurologic injuries.
The problem.
These workers’ clinics work hand in hand with insurance companies and are often focused on keeping the cost of your medical care down. We have heard them tell our clients that they do not want to order an expensive test, like an MRI, or make a referral to an outside specialist.
One of the family practice doctors at one of these workers’ clinics even told our client (his patient) that it was not his role to give her a referral to an orthopedic surgeon for her rotator cuff injury, and that the workers’ comp insurance company or their IME physician would have to do this.
This is completely wrong.
Here’s another problem with going to a doctor your company recommends after a serious work injury in DC.
By law in DC, you have the right to choose your own physician. However, once you have made that choice and seen the physician several times, you have effectively chosen that doctor as your treating physician. It is very hard to change physicians once that happens. You will either need approval from the insurance company or you will have to request a change from the D.C. Office of Workers’ Compensation, which is a lengthy, time-consuming process.
We know that a lot of employers in DC and insurance companies tell you that you have to go to their workers’ comp doctor or “the” workers’ comp doctor or an “approved” workers’ comp doctor, but it just is not true!
If you get hurt on the job in DC, you do not have to go to some medical clinic that your job or their workers’ comp insurance company sent you to. There are no panel physicians or approved physicians in Washington, DC workers’ comp cases.
Don’t let your job or anyone else bully you into getting substandard medical care after a serious work injury.
