Request and record inventory
- Identify the requested examination and questions to be addressed.
- Confirm the applicable form, examiner qualifications, and assignment requirements.
- Identify the prior evaluation date and the period to review.
- List each supplied document, author, date, covered period, and PDF pages.
- Mark incomplete documents and referenced attachments that are unavailable.
- Distinguish referral assertions from independently supplied supporting records.
Historical baseline and interval change
- Attribute historical diagnoses and findings to their original authors and dates.
- Separate current-note content from copied or quoted earlier history.
- Preserve symptom frequency, time frame, and qualifiers such as partial improvement.
- Record treatment participation as documented or reported, with the source identified.
- Separate medication lists from reported adherence, response, and tolerability.
- Avoid inferring causality from the sequence of treatment and change alone.
Work, relationships, and daily activities
- Record actual job demands, hours, task changes, supports, and accommodations.
- Keep continued employment and reported limitations together when both appear.
- Note the settings in which social activities are manageable or difficult.
- Separate household activity reports from formal capacity opinions.
- Preserve the observation window and limits of each collateral source.
- Identify unavailable attendance, performance, or other corroborating records.
Scores, overlapping symptoms, and missing evidence
- Retain instrument names, reported totals, score dates, and source pages.
- Distinguish score dates from the date a later summary records them.
- Note unavailable response sheets or administration details.
- Preserve uncertainty about the contributions of pain, sleep, mood, or other conditions.
- Distinguish “not documented in this packet” from “did not occur.”
- List unresolved questions without assigning a new diagnosis or credibility finding.
Final source check
- Open the source pages for material summary entries.
- Check that calm behavior at one visit has not erased longitudinal difficulties.
- Check that improvement has not become resolution.
- Check that repeated history has not become independent corroboration.
- Check that different settings or time periods have not become false contradictions.
- Keep current examination findings, opinions, and VA adjudication separate from the record summary.
Put the checklist to work
The Jordan Demo example includes specific page references for each of these source-verification problems. It is entirely fictional and can be used to compare a record-review output with a fixed source packet.
PsyReview provides chronology, topic-based evidence, and source-page references for supplied PDFs. The evaluator checks the source and develops the examination findings.
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Prepared October 31, 2026 by EasyDocForms. Editorial workflow aid; not independently clinically reviewed or endorsed by VA.