Avid readers of our blog have likely read our prior coverage of electronic health records and the difficulties folks might encounter with them. Folks have long had the right to access their medical records; getting them corrected has been more of a headache. The Cures Act contained rules that were meant to make immediately accessible, upon request, much of what compromises our medical charts. When people look at their records, they will no doubt notice errors. The next step is fixing them; and good luck getting your medical records corrected.

Sometimes errors or omissions in the records require us to forensically reconstruct what happened. For example we recently prevailed in a lawsuit where a pediatric ARNP avulsed a newborn baby’s vocal cord and punctured the wall of his airway, necessitating emergent transfer to a hospital with pediatric ENT, but none of this made it into her operative note. In an older case, over injuries to our client’s back, the records contained mention of an incident where our client was supposedly riding a bicycle when he was crashed into by a car. That single line in his records led to an entire sideshow of a police report the defendant’s insurance company supposedly had (it did not), and their search for all records related to a horrific bike crash (that did not happen). This despite our client’s doctor trying to correct the note, and appending an explanation into the records.

Patients have the right to access their medical records. It typically takes a written request to the provider. The responses vary in time and substance. What is significant, though, is that these medical records are far more expansive than what you find on MyChart or similar apps and portals. So, with new rules meant to ease access to records, navigating how to correct them remains uncharted territory.