Medical records on disks

I was wondering what the liklihood is that at UCLA medical center individual medical records can be supplied on a disk or memory card.

You can request your records on DVD.
There may be a charge.

That is what I thought. They keep telling her she has to pay for each page and their are hundreds. All we really want is the pathology report. She had her lung removed after 3 negative biopsis becuase of a large visual tumor at the bottom of her left lung. After surgery no word about what it was or what kind of tumor, nothing.

I got the entire dump from my surgery on DVD (as PDF) for $20, but I guess there’s no law limiting how much a hospital can charge.

Rather than asking the hospital, have you tried asking the pathologist? Generally, the doctors do not work for the hospital directly.

We have no idea who the pathologist is. I assumed it was just a lab in the hospital?

The pathologist’s report may be the property of the hospital, not the pathologist; reports may be provided to the pathologist’s billing office as a courtesy, but the office may not have the right to turn it over to the patient.

That said, UCLA will, in fact, provide records on CD for an additional fee. If all your friend wants is the pathologist’s report, it probably won’t cost her anything to get a paper copy. The medical records request form will allow her to specify what, exactly, she’s looking for and how she wants to receive it. (The form is available here, along with instructions on how to send it in.)

If she has specific questions about the results, she will have to speak with her doctor about them; the pathologist’s office probably will not interpret the results over the phone. In fact, the surgeon who ordered the biopsies may have the report and may be able to review it with her if she makes an appointment.

This is what we were concerned with. We had extremely strong reason to believe that the mass was actually scar tissue that had built up around food that was inhaled. Dr.s were advised of this at every stage of the process before going into surgery. They all felt that inhaling something into the left lung was highly unlikely, she had all the risk factors that make this likely. After surgery the surgeon avoided me and was evasive in every conversation.

It should be straightforward for a patient to get all or any part of their medical record from the Medical Record department at a hospital.

If you only want a specific part, ask for just that part.

It’s probably easier to get paper. If you need the images, that can get a bit more complex but you would typically want a CD/DVD for those as they are very large files.

Fill out the form, signed by the patient or their proxy.

Your records are yours; the hospital is only the steward. Any fees should be trivial on a per page basis. Most of the record is junk, so don’t make the mistake of asking for the whole thing. I wonder if the surgical record and discharge summary might be of value also, but I tend not to go into the weeds of this kind of underlying issue.