Paying for your own medical records

According to the Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act (HIPAA) of 1996, you have the right to obtain copies of most of your medical records, whether they are maintained electronically or on paper. These include doctor’s notes, medical test results, lab reports, and billing information. But depending on your medical provider, reality determines how much of your records you will actually get. You also need to be aware that HIPAA allows your provider to charge a “reasonable” fee for your records. Now the law does actually spell out what they can charge for, but not how much they can charge. Nor does it define what “reasonable” is. So you can pay upwards of $10 a page and that might still be considered “reasonable”.

When I started requesting my records, I was charged anywhere between zero cost to me, up to $10, and then .50¢ a page on top of that. So be prepared to pay some rather hefty fees, for documents that technically belong to you. Now there are some ways to possibly get around these fees and those often deal with switching to another provider or for a legal case.

What Can I Expect
When I requested my records, I received anything from just a few pages for a doctor that I had seen a dozen or more times, to 200-plus pages for another doctor. You can expect to get doctor’s notes, diagnostic results, test results, lab results, and X-rays. But again, it is dependent on the doctor. If the doctor doesn’t want to provide some results or notes, then they can simply say that they are missing or they have been destroyed and there isn’t much you can do about it, without hiring a lawyer.

So you have options and I recommend that you get ahold of your records, digitize them.