The HITECH Act offered cash incentives for hospitals and other healthcare providers to migrate from handwritten paper medical records to electronic health records. Then came along the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act). I felt this was unjust to allow such profiteering over patients’ own healthcare information. Although we paid those expenses upfront, the direct cost was eventually paid out of the eventual recovery by our clients. When ordering records on behalf of our clients, Painter Law Firm would routinely receive single invoices of hundreds to thousands of dollars. States, such as Texas, allowed healthcare providers to charge a per page fee that was indexed to inflation and, thus, increased every year. The fees that doctors and hospitals to charge for production of medical records were largely dictated by state law. So profitable, in fact, that in some cases patients might need a second mortgage to pay the fees demanded to get a copy of their own medical records. The truth is, though, that selling copies of medical records to patients has historically been a very profitable business. I bet that most people don’t think of medical records as a profit center. Today, though, I’m going to focus to the federally-protected right of access.
#Ciox pay invoices series
I could write a whole series of articles on this topic, including very real hurdles like incomplete production of records and audit trails.
One of the challenges straight out of the gate in a medical malpractice case is getting a complete set of the medical records.
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