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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Mike Leavitt's Health and Human Services Department figures it costs about 12 cents a page to copy medical records. But medical providers often charge as much as $3 or $4 a page to copy the records.
Lawsuits filed against two Salt Lake area hospitals claim such charges are unconscionable and violate Utah consumer law and federal laws on access to medical records.
Attorney Lester Perry filed the lawsuits in behalf of Robert Witt and Samuel Boone.
The lawsuits allege that it cost $2.23 and $2.95 a page to obtain medical records maintained by St. Mark's Hospital and Cottonwood Hospital and managed by ChartONE. The Massachusetts-based company was hired by both hospitals to handle information requests.
Witt paid $26.51 and Boone paid $31.23 for their records. In their lawsuits filed Dec. 20, they also seek $2,000 each in damages.
Attorneys have long complained that hospitals and the information management companies they employ charge outlandish sums when records requests are made through a third party, such as a lawyer or insurance adjustor.
"Ultimately, the person who ends up paying these exorbitant costs is the patient, and a patient deserves to get medical records at a reasonable cost," Perry said.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, passed to give patients greater access to medical records, restricts copying costs to labor and supplies.
The cost-based restrictions apply only when the request is submitted by the patient or someone authorized to make medical decisions for the patient.
ChartONE, and the 1,000 or so hospitals it serves, contend personal injury attorneys and insurance adjustors do not qualify and must pay a higher fee that more accurately reflects their costs.
In such cases ChartONE charges a $16.75 base fee to cover research, retrieval and sorting costs, a $2 handling fee, plus 67 cents per page.
Peter Henderson, executive vice president of marketing for ChartONE, said the company differentiates between requests for individual and business purposes, but he would not detail the pricing structure.
Intermountain Health Care, which owns Cottonwood and 18 other hospitals throughout Utah, farmed out its "release of information" services to ChartONE about five years ago, after the passage of HIPAA magnified the number of records requests.
Documents often are spread among hospitals, clinics, doctors' offices and storage facilities, IHC spokesman Daron Cowley said.
"Some people think you just get the records and run them through a copy machine. But that's not the way it works," Cowley said. "It's a lengthy and labor-intensive process."
And it not intended to be used as "an alternative discovery mechanism" for lawyers, according to a letter from St. Mark's Hospital.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
