A Trap to Avoid in the VA/IDES General Medical Exam

After you file your claim through your MSC and they request exams for each of your conditions, you will be contacted by one of the three contractors the VA employs to conduct IDES C&P exams. When the contractor provides you with notice of the exams, you must ensure that this notice addresses all of your physical conditions. For instance, I recently had a client with ankylosing spondylitis in both the cervical and thoracolumbar spine. While the MSC had put in the proper exam requests,  the contractor’s intake staff did not receive a request for a cervical spine exam. So, on the exam day, the examining physician could not complete a cervical spine exam- a critical exam in our case. The lesson from this incident is very straightforward- if this happens to you, be sure to contact your MSC immediately to submit a request for any condition for which the contractor does not have an exam request. Otherwise, that condition will not be evaluated, and it may take several weeks to reschedule an exam to assess it.