Medical records
Treatment gap
A treatment gap is an unexplained break in a claimant's medical care — a stretch with no visits between the injury and later treatment — that defense teams read as evidence the injury was minor, resolved, or unrelated.
Every adjuster and defense lawyer runs the same timeline exercise: date of incident, first treatment, then the spacing of every visit after. A six-week silence after the ER visit, a four-month hole in the middle of physical therapy — each gap becomes an argument: if it hurt that badly, why didn’t they see anyone?
Why it matters in practice
Gaps are argument, not proof — and they usually have explanations: no insurance, no transport, a provider’s scheduling backlog, childcare, work that couldn’t be missed, or simply a patient told to “come back if it gets worse.” The difference between a damaging gap and a neutralized one is whether the explanation is documented and discovered before the defense finds the gap. Plaintiff teams that map the treatment timeline early can address gaps in the demand or prep the client’s testimony; teams that discover them at deposition improvise.
For the defense, gap-hunting is standard record review — and equally about diligence, since a “gap” sometimes just marks records that were never requested from a provider the chart mentions.
In the fact record
This is timeline work, which is why FactMarshal’s medical analysis renders visit density directly: every provider’s visits on one axis around the incident date, so gaps — real ones and records-retrieval artifacts — are visible in week one, not at mediation.