HITECH Act Medical Records

Hardly a day goes by without a letter from my office either requesting medical records or paying for them. Some days, I sign more than a dozen. It’s perhaps the most common thread among all my cases: the vast majority of my clients have been physically injured in one way or another, and at a bare minimum, I need the records from their doctors and hospitals to show the diagnoses they have and the treatment they have received.

Every patient has a right to receive their medical records, and by law should be able to obtain those records promptly at no markup, with no padded fees, and no unnecessary charges from the hospital or the records company. But if there’s money to be made, someone will try to make it, and over the past decade a whole cottage industry has developed around the “business” of trying to cheat patients trying to get their medical records. Sometimes health care providers outsource this “business” to third-party companies, and sometimes the hospitals and health systems play the con game themselves.

Federal law is quite clear: a patient has the “right to obtain from [their health care providers] a copy of [their medical records] in an electronic format,” 42 USC § 17935(e)(1), and that health care provider is allowed to bill “only the cost of … [c]opying, including the cost of supplies for and labor of copying,” 45 CFR 164.524(c)(4)(i). This is all part of the the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act).

Simple, right? If a hospital wanted to do the right thing, then whenever a patient requested records, the hospital would send them a CD in the mail and a modest bill, one that would typically be under $50 and would never exceed $100. But there’s no money to be made in charging “only the cost” of copying electronic records to a CD, so a number of these entities have a policy that, if a patient requests their records, then the hospital bills the maximum it possibly could.
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