“Some are even going so far as to say if your email address ends in.
For example, many providers now consider a patient’s request that medical records be sent to them in care of a law firm as a “third-party directive” that falls outside the fee cap. Without a firm definition of “third-party directive,” medical providers, she said, are wildly expanding what the term encompasses. That term, she said is not defined by HITECH or HIPAA, the two acts that had largely regulated medical records requests for years. “The Floodgates Are Open” on Medical Record ChargesĬarpenter said the root of the problem is that the decision rests on its use of the term “third-party directives,” when concluding that they fall outside HITECH’s $6.50 flat-fee restriction. The decision has sent shockwaves through the legal community, as prices for obtaining client medical records soar and additional hurdles slow the progress of cases. , contained two prongs: it removed fee restrictions applied when a patient requests records be sent to a third party such as an attorney, and it lifted previous rules requiring providers send records electronically at the patient’s request even if the record was not stored electronically. “It takes us back to 2009, when copy centers were getting rich off of patients just for providing their records,” Melanie Carpenter, Special Counsel for ChartSquad, told CVN. Promoted Content: From time to time, CVN will highlight partner-provided services that we believe are of interest to our readers.Ī recent federal court decision has set medical records regulations back more than a decade and resurrected document “profit centers” that have upended how lawyers receive critical records, an attorney for the nation’s leading patient-based records service told CVN.