Burdensome Fees Limit Patient Access To Medical Records
New findings suggest that copy fees can greatly limit patient access to their medical records. Patients in the US are supposed to be able to easily obtain electronic copies of their medical records, but steep fees make that difficult for many across the nation. So why are there fees in the first place if patients are supposed to be allowed easy access to their records? Well, according to Dr. Harlan Krumholz of the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, last year new federal guidelines were issued allowing healthcare providers to “charge fees for labor, costs of creating electronic or paper copies of records and postage.”
