Kentucky: IME May Use Clinical Skill and Judgment in Construing AMA Guides

While a Kentucky physician must base his or her impairment rating regarding an injured worker on the AMA Guides (5th Ed.), the physician is not required to park his or her medical judgment at the examining room door. He or she may utilize clinical skill and judgment in assessing the level of impairment. Thus, while the AMA Guides required the evaluation of the worker’s shoulder impairment to be based upon “active” range of motion measurements, the physician was entitled to use passive measurements in determining the impairment level where the physician felt the ROM measurements obtained from an injured worker were implausible and indicative of poor effort.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Cunningham v. Quad/Graphics, Inc., 2017 Ky. App. LEXIS 268 (June 16, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 80.07.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see