Digg this up!
Although HIPAA requires hospitals and doctors to give patients and their families their medical records within 30 days, a lot of patients report having to jump through hoops to get them.
While there are no statistics on how many patients have trouble accessing their own records, there have been "repeated" complaints to the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a senior health information privacy specialist at the department's Office for Civil Rights, which enforces the federal law that gives patients access to their records.
"It's crazy ridiculous when you can't walk out of a doctor's office or hospital with a copy of your medical records if you ask for them," says Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
It's especially difficult when a patient gets transferred to another hospital, but the first hospital drags its feet releasing the records.
Case in point--Leslie Cryster's father needed open-heart surgery, and she wanted to get his medical records showing the results of a cardiac catherization performed at another hospital. However, she had to threaten to call a lawyer to make the previous hospital release his records. Had they not done so, the catherization would have had to have been repeated--and catherization is highly invasive.
And in another instance, Fred Holliday was suffering from kidney cancer and had to be transferred to another hospital. However, the first hospital refused to release his medical records to his wife, Regina. As a result, the second hospital couldn't give him any pain medication when he arrived since they didn't know how much was already in his system. It took six hours for Regina to get the records (according to NPR, they originally wanted to make her wait 21 days)--but it must have felt like six years. When she finally got them, she found out that Fred's bladder had ruptured almost a month earlier--but nobody read the record.
Obviously, HIPAA needs more teeth--it should never, ever take threats from loved ones to release medical records.