Give Me My Health Records — Free of Charge!
Posted on November 9, 2009
Filed Under Fitness, Life & Times | 1 Comment
This isn’t what I’d call the most significant personal horror story related to health care. In fact, in the scheme of such stories, what I had happen this past Friday is pretty tame. However, it does highlight in a small way how screwed up and non customer friendly dealing with health care is even in the context of very simple requests.
My story (or at least the first chapter of the story) is all about trying to get my medical records transferred from my previous primary care physician to my new physician.
The drama began a few weeks ago when I called my old doctor’s office in LA (Pacific Palisades to be exact, in case that adds any color for readers) to inquire about getting my records sent up to SF where I now live so that I could provide some history for my new PCP whom I would be meeting with soon. Of course, I could not speak with anyone live in my former physician’s office in LA — instead I got to wade through their voicemail tree and leave a message asking that somebody call me back to explain how I get my health records. Nobody bothered to call me back.
Fast forward to this past week when I set up my appointment to meet with a new doctor here in SF. My new office emailed me a simple waiver form that I could sign, scan and email a PDF back to the SF office so they could forward to my old LA doctor’s office to get my records. Great, problem solved. So I thought.
On Friday afternoon — a couple days before I was scheduled to meet with my new doctor — a woman from the front desk crew at the LA office called to inform me that in order to get my medical records I had to pay a $35 “administrative fee” to have them copied if I wanted to come in and pick them up. For a total of $45 they would do me the favor of sending them to me in SF. My guess is that they would be arriving via Pony Express?
I couldn’t resist. I just had to call the LA office back to understand how they could justify being charged $45 to get something that would take probably 3 minutes to photocopy and another 3 minutes to fax to my SF doctor’s office (for essentially no charge as part of what I imagine is a flat rate long distance phone plan, but imagine if they had the technology to scan a copy of my medical records and email them to me?).
“How do you justify charging me $35 to get a copy of MY medical records,” I asked the woman on the phone. She informed me it was an “administrative fee” for the time it would take someone in their office to make a copy. By my math that comes to $700 an hour to copy my records. Wow, I think I know where to send my resume for my next job!
“What if I came in to just get my file,” I said — in all seriousness of course. Again, the kind woman on the other end of the line had a quick reply. “We’re not allowed to let patients take the records”. What the hell? I suspect I signed something along the lines of what the medical profession considers a privacy policy that includes some provision that I can’t take the files. Do they need a paper trail for insurance purposes, auditing maybe? Fine I thought, I’ll just go in and get them so I can “go across the street and copy them myself” I said. “Sorry, we aren’t allowed to let the records leave our office”.
At this point I figured this was going nowhere. I thought this might actually be considered one of the “procedures” that a doctor gets paid for by the insurance providers — just like doing an x-ray or performing a blood test. Maybe I need my health plan to call my old LA office to negotiate a price for this service?
So at this point I’m going in to my new doctor here in LA as a clean slate. Thankfully I have my mental faculties so I can theoretically download from my memory the essentials of my medical history for my SF doctor. As far as I’m concerned when it comes to my medical history, my next doctor’s appointment is indeed the “first day of the rest of my life”.
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99% sure the person you talked to was wrong. Medical offices hate turning over control of records, but the records are yours and they can’t hang onto them if you demand them.
I still have some MRI scans in my house that the hospital made me PROMISE I would return after I got them reviewed by someone outside the hospital.
Don’t take my word for it, though. Talk to a lawyer or something to get the real scoop.