The case for AB 1293 was easy to make. A panel QME issues a report that never addresses apportionment, or answers causation for the shoulder and says nothing about the cervical spine. Somebody requests a supplemental report, which the evaluator has 60 days to produce. Somebody else notices the deposition, which can be set as far out as 120 days. Months come off the claim, the per-page and per-report billing keeps running, and the underlying medical opinion has not moved.

Three years ago, telling a workers’ compensation defense firm that AI could build a medical chronology was a sales pitch. Today it is an assumption. Every serious vendor in this market has an extraction engine, and most have had one long enough to have worked the obvious bugs out of it.