RoS: Barriers to accessing medical records for patients & providers, and how that harms care

RoS: Review of Systems

How long have we all, collectively in healthcare, spent on hold with medical records departments, listening to mind-numbing muzac or assembled around the fax machine, waiting for your patient’s crucial imaging reports or culture results from another hospital to come through? Way too long. Difficulty accessing medical records can be extremely difficult, which we explore today with two guests. Ilana Yurkiewicz is a physician and writer, and recently published an article on Undark, entitled Paper Trails: Living and Dying with Fragmented Medical Records, which explores how poor communication of medical records resulted in harm to one of her patients. Carolyn Lye, a medical student and law student at Yale, also joins us; she is lead author of an article published in JAMA Open, entitled Assessment of US Hospital Compliance With Regulations for Patients’ Requests for Medical Records, which studied the difficulties patients experience in requesting medical records through a secret shopper study model.

They both join us today to talk about how difficult it is to access medical records. If you enjoy the show, please rate, review & subscribe to us wherever you listen, it helps others find the show, and share us on social media and with our friends and colleagues. You can find me at @audreymdmph and our show @rospodcast. Tweet us feedback and suggestions, or email me at contactATrospod.org. Thanks for listening!

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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