The patient, a wiry businessman in his 50s, needed a copy of his medical records to bring to a specialist for a second opinion. He assumed that getting the copies would be straightforward; the records were, after all, his.
But after multiple trips to his doctor’s office and the hospital and several days of missed work, he learned otherwise. At the hospital, after spending the good part of a morning hunting down the right person to process his request, he learned that signing the requisite permission forms was not enough. He would have to pay for the copies that would take several days to put together. Those copies turned out to be incomplete, so he had to wait another few days, and pay more, for copies of the missing pages.
Read Dr. Pauline Chen’s article here.
