This quick and simple trick will greatly improve the accuracy of your impairment rating reports.
What’s the secret of reproducible measurements? Having patients do warm up exercises before taking down the exact numbers.
You’ll find that taking the the time to encourage your patient to do two or more warm up exercsises before taking measurement is absolutely worth it.
Your results will be more accurate and consistent, with greater reproducibility. Reproducibility within 10% is necessary for measurements to be considered valid by the AMA guides. Reproducible measurements also support stronger impairment conclusions. Although it may seem like extra work, the time you’ll save doing measurements on a patient that is properly warmed up will limit the need to reproduce measurements later on because your exam findings were off by more than 10%.
Don’t forget to do both the right and left side (yes, even the non-injured side!) so that you may compare measurements.