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Health Care Advocates’ Power Kit: How to Get Your Own Medical Records
Why should you request your records?
Even if you have absolutely no complaints about your health care, reading your own medical records is an essential first step to becoming an informed, proactive patient. It accomplishes a bunch of things all at once.
You should especially get a copy of every lab report, X-ray study and specialist’s report. The easiest way is to start asking for these routinely, up front, when you’re about to have the test done. But if you’ve got any kind of complex medical history, go ahead and ask your primary doctor’s office for a copy of your entire chart.
You become literate in your own body
You learn the lingo your doctors use and you remind yourself of the concerns your doctors have about you that you might rather not think about.
You learn a lot about your doctor
Does he or she have an organized set of records? Do they record what you told them in your sessions with reasonable accuracy and completeness? If the answers are no, you might want to think about getting another doctor.
You can correct errors
Do your records say something about you that’s just plain wrong? Or do they leave out something important, like an allergy to a common drug such as penicillin? Now is your chance to fix things before they have bad consequences.
You can prevent potentially huge failures in communication
People find abnormal test results in their own records with distressing frequency — but usually they don’t look until it’s too late. There are so many test results getting filed into medical records and so many opportunities for miscommunication that you can never assume no news is good news when the doctor’s office has failed to tell you about a test result.
