Why Is It So Hard to Get Medical Records?!?!?!?!?

[momz]

Once the statute of limitations for malpractice is passed, the records go buh-bye.

 

[Turn the Page]

Once the statute of limitations for malpractice is passed, the records go buh-bye.

See that's the thing though. They still had the records, they just wouldn't look for them. They gave my doctors office the run around for nearly 6 months then finally said the records had been destroyed. I called down there to ask who else may still have the records, spoke to a woman in the medical records department who agreed to check and found them right away. The records are digitized, they can pull them up immediately and have immediate access to them......it's just no one bothered to look and then lied about it.

I tried my OB's office but she has since retired, I tried the vascular surgeon for the postpartum DVT and they actually still have the records related to that in storage and agreed to dig them out and send them up if I needed them but by that time I already had confirmation from the hospital that they still had the records.

I think when it's all said and done I will end up with an extra hard copy of the records which yes, will be staying in my personal filing cabinet at home in case I ever need them again.

 

[BrianL]

These laws already exist, though they are not strongly enforced. So, why do you have trouble getting your medical info? Well, first, as I said, it's not strongly enforced (yet). So, hospitals and clinics generally tend to put is as a back-burner issue. Compliance is much more concerned with accidental (or intentional) Medicare fraud than they are with patients taking an extra few weeks to get their documents.

Second, there are much stronger laws against the production of documents without a proper authorization. Yes, I'm sure that everyone posting here has signed many authorizations, but did you look at what it/they said? Did it name the right entity? How long was the authorization good for? It can't be open ended, and generally, you need a new one every year (at the very least). Did it specify the documentation to be produced? If so, and you try to use it for something outside that scope/time period, you'll need to get another one. For example, if it said "all records to date", and you try to use is again 3 months later to get the interim records, you can't. Conversely, if it didn't specify the documentation to be produced (or for example, said something like "all documents pertaining to XXX") that's a HUGE hassle for information departments. You're talking about, in some cases, decades worth of medical records - not all of which may have been digitized. Sometimes we go back to the requestor to try and save them money: "Hey, do you know you asked for approximately 500 pages of records? Do you know we're allowed to charge you $XXXX for producing those? Do you maybe wanna be a bit more specific in your request?" Also, those types of requests tend to implicate issues of state law. For example, in Michigan, there are protections for documents involving substance abuse disorders and sexually transmitted diseases which are stronger than the Federal protections, and require a specific request. So, if an information department gets an open-ended request they have to go back to the requestor and ask for clarification: "Hey, ummm, you might not know this, but the agent you appointed in that massive class action suit you don't even remember agreeing to be a part of is asking for those records about the STD you had treated when you were 18. Are you cool with that?"

Third, it's expensive (see above). Yes, we're living in a digital world, and every hospital is doing its best to get everything put onto an electronic medical records system, but we aren't all there yet. So, what happens if we get requests for records that aren't digitized, BUT the requestor demands that the records be produced electronically (which they're allowed to do)? Well, we have to task one person to dig their physical records out of storage and digitize it. My employer is willing to do this, because we're one of the biggest hospital systems in the state. Anything smaller than us? Yeah, you're lucky if they even have a separate information management department. Also, when you start asking for old records, they start being hard to find. Like literal random cardboard box in a football field sized warehouse hard to find. This super sucks for hospitals, because although we're allowed to charge for the time we spent making copies and/or converting information, we can't charge (anymore) for the time we have to spend looking for the records.


I'm sorry you guys have had a hard time getting your records, but it's not as if hospitals are greedily hoarding them for some nefarious purpose. Trust me, they wish they didn't have to keep paying for their secure storage for the length of the recommended regulatory retention periods. In all honesty, you've probably run upon some overworked/understaffed practices that just can't keep up with all the requests they get. Ultimately, these people are supposed to be healers, not paper pushers. Yes, it's their job to make sure you can all get copies of your records in a timely manner, but they don't always see it that way.

Everything you say is true, but it is exactly what is wrong with the system. This is what they need to fix. I never said it would be a simple matter. It would be an intense and costly one, but it's still something that needs to be corrected, though I realize that nobody really has the motivation to do so. It's the patients who suffer because of it, not the healthcare organizations.