2 ms·

Without doing some research I'm not sure that this could ever have worked anyway. Unless things have changed a lot in the last couple of years, medical practice

Without doing some research I'm not sure that this could ever have worked anyway. Unless things have changed a lot in the last couple of years, medical practices are allowed to and generally do charge a non-trivial copying fee for providing records to patients; these fees have legally set base cost and per-page caps that I believe are updated yearly. I'm sure some of this has changed as offices shifted to EMR (Electronic Medical Records) systems, but many offices don't scan the entire existing chart into a new system - just the key parts relevant to current care (e.g. labs from the last 6-12 months, etc.). The full chart is still in a tagged manila folder on a shelf or in a box depending on the office. I've not regularly seen practices charge for sending records to other medical practices or for providing limited information to the patient directly (e.g. copies of labs), but that's usually not for an entire chart it's for items that can reasonably be faxed. Where I have seen practices charge it's when they also have a regularly scheduled outside service that comes in to scan entire charts that have been requested and for some specialties (e.g. neurology) those charts can easily be 500-1000 pages. I suspect that if a patient wants an entire chart transferred to a new practice that the old one will require that they request and pay for the copy, then it's the patient's job to get it to the new folks. Changing systems can also be a problem; I know of one specialty practice that has a firewalled-off 2003 server with their old EMR on it because when they migrated to a new system only demographics and some other basic information could be automatically imported. When previous patients schedule appointments, they go into the old system and export all the relevant records to PDFs, then import those into the patient's chart in the new system. Given the still-widespread need to either scan a bunch of paper, retrieve records from multiple systems, and pay for printing or burning to a CD I see no reasonable way for a company to offer that service free or even inexpensively. Update: here's a nice resource on per-state costs: http://www.lamblawoffice.com/medical-records-copying-charges.html http://www.lamblawoffice.com/medical-records-copying-charges... In Illinois, for example, it can legally cost you a minimum of $25 even for a single page, though as I noted most offices don't seem to have a problem with not charging for small numbers of pages.

Mz 11y ago
Yeah, requesting records was a thing I did at my old job. I was allowed to pay fees up to a certain limit without it going to approval. Above a certain amount, my boss needed to approve the expense. We were an entirely electronic records based system. I think I reviewed a paper claim once in the 5+ years I was there. I had to get instructions on how to do that because I still needed to handle it via our computer system in order to be able to cut a check. So even with almost everything being faxed, digitized, etc. there were still fees to pay when requesting records. And I have reviewed claims that had hundreds of pages. It wasn't the norm, but if someone was in a serious accident that was followed by hospitalization and multiple surgeries, that did sometimes come across my desk. So, I agree with you. Requesting records is actually something of a pain, even with standardized letters and procedures developed by a large company with years of experience. And, no, it is generally not free.

Mz 11y ago

Yeah, requesting records was a thing I did at my old job. I was allowed to pay fees up to a certain limit without it going to approval. Above a certain amount, my boss needed to approve the expense. We were an entirely electronic records based system. I think I reviewed a paper claim once in the 5+ years I was there. I had to get instructions on how to do that because I still needed to handle it via our computer system in order to be able to cut a check. So even with almost everything being faxed, digitized, etc. there were still fees to pay when requesting records. And I have reviewed claims that had hundreds of pages. It wasn't the norm, but if someone was in a serious accident that was followed by hospitalization and multiple surgeries, that did sometimes come across my desk. So, I agree with you. Requesting records is actually something of a pain, even with standardized letters and procedures developed by a large company with years of experience. And, no, it is generally not free.