There are now several types of reports that DVA will request when you begin the journy of submitting claims.
Types of Reports Requested
- Diagnostic Assessment
- Combined Impairment Assessment
- Medical Impairment Assessment
- Permanent Impairment Assessment
- Risk Factor Assessment
- Request for Apportionments only
Diagnostic Assessment
Diagnostic Assessments (DIA) are a request from DVA to get information to help to determine the claim. Its a binary yes/no decision point on the acceptance or not of that claim. These are normally sent from a Claim Support Officer, who is like a Delegate of the Delegate, responsible for gathering information and they don’t make any decisions on the acceptance. They will come from various departments such as
- Cols Claims
- Primary Claims (more for VEA)
- Hobart Claims
- RCG Sydney
These departments all have different forms and methods of conducting their processes, though there is 80% overlap.
Permanent Impairment Assessment
Permanent Impairment Assessments (PIA) are a request from DVA on the level of injury or impairment that arises from the accepted claims. At this stage the conditions are accepted and its a matter of determining the level of impairment that arises. These will come from your PI Delegate, most often based in the departments at:
- Perth PI
- Brisbane PI
- Primary Claims (for VEA or multiact)
These are also called Medical Impairment Assessments (MIA) at some of the departments but its the same thing essentially as the PIA.
Combined Impairment Assessments
For Combined Impairments they will combine the
- DIA
- PIA/MIA
These requests are new since the end of 2023. They are a combination of the two separate stages, pushed to the front, presumably to satisfy Senate-mandated KPIs of time to assessment.
They have the ability to be messy and time consuming to do correctly.
They will be requesting a PIA on conditions that have not yet been determined as accepted or rejected, which has the strong possibility of introducing chaos and procedural variability into the overall process when it comes to the “Apportionment” of the impairment, which is where a decision is made by the Dr/Delegate on what conditions cause the impairment.
If a condition that ends up being rejected that Impairment will then act “against” the patient as the impairment points are then deducted (or not included) rather than adding to the total.
The process at this stage involves careful adherence to the process of
- Taking a thorough history
- Sending for Imaging for all relevant areas.
- Thoroughly examining the patient.
- Determining the existence of the disease
- Determining the Impairment
- Combining all of this to make sure all the information is consistent internally
- Making sure its all consistent with past PIAs that have been done
