Massachusetts Personal Injury Library
Legal questions surround abandoned medical records
Massachusetts attorney Thomas M. Kiley concentrates on legal issues affecting children’s health. A recent article in The Boston Globe indicated there is a gap in state law about who owns abandoned medical records.
According to the article, the medical records kept by a doctor who recently closed his office are scheduled to be discarded. The current law does not require that patients be notified about this destruction of their medical information.
According to The Boston Globe, Emerson Hospital in Concord said they will take possession of the abandoned medical files and contact patients about how to retrieve their personal information, as well as how to find another doctor. Dr. Ronald T. Moody was evicted in September because state regulators said he had let his medical license lapse.
The state medical board only has authority over the doctor’s license, not the medical records. Medical records include the patient’s health history as well as life-threatening conditions such as allergies or particular medications. The board doesn’t have the authority to take over or hold the medical records when a doctor’s office has been closed and the license rebuked. According to the staff of the medical board, there is no state law that addresses this problem.
Massachusetts state law does require physicians to keep a patient’s medical records for seven years after the last contact with the patient. After that, the doctor is allowed to destroy the record and is not required to notify the patient. The law also requires the estate of a doctor who has died or a doctor who inherits a practice to follow this law.
The state law and the board’s regulations, however, don’t cover what to do with the medical records when a doctor abruptly closes or abandons his practice. The Massachusetts Medical Society, a professional organization for physicians, also has no policy for the issue of abandoned medical records.
This issue relates to the current state and national initiatives to convert the paper files of doctors to electronic health records. The majority of doctors do not keep medical records in an electronic form. A Harvard study found that only 17% of American doctors have entered paper files into electronic form. A new state law passed last year requires health providers to switch over to electronic health records by 2015. President Obama has also made this practice of electronic health records a major part of his proposed health care reform.
According to the federal government, an electronic health record is a longitudinal electronic record of a patient’s health information generated by any visit to a health care facility. This includes patient information, progress notes, problems, medications, vital signs, past medical history, immunizations, laboratory test data, and radiology reports. By digitizing this information, all the health care facilities working with a patient can share information easily and quickly.
The government is attempting to find a way to establish standards for electronic health records. Currently, health records are dependent on software database vendors. The federal government is attempting to create new standards that will allow health care providers to create clinical vocabularies, healthcare message exchanges in which one system exchanges messages with another, and relating content and structure of the data entities in relation to each other. This kind of consistency in standards will provide for healthcare agency interoperability, the ability to share information of a similar nature.
