Pod4Cure #1: Paperwork for Proper Care

In this episode of Pod4Cure, we discuss why it can be beneficial for everyone to request access to their medical records. Hear from Lauren Zelko, All4Cure’s records liaison, about how All4Cure utilizes records. Sam Preciado of Northwest Medical Specialties’ records department stops by to give some great insight into why accessing you and your loved one’s medical records is not only your right but your responsibility.

Sara Lippert (Left), Lauren Zelko (Middle), & Samantha Preciado - Records Lead at Northwest Medical Specialties (Right)

Transcript:

Sara: Hello and welcome to Pod4Cure. The podcast brought to you by All4Cure discussing healthcare for patients with myeloma, their caregivers, and everyone in between. My name is Sara, and today I am joined by Lauren, All4Cure's resident Medical Records Coordinator.

Lauren: Hi, I'm Lauren. I'm the Medical Records Coordinator here at All4Cure. I started in 2018, and I take care of all the requests, follow-ups, and incoming records that we deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Sara: Today, we are discussing the ins and outs of health records, why they're important, and ways that you could obtain your records. Stick around to the end, where we interview Sam Preciado, Northwest Medical Specialties' Medical Records Lead. So to get started, Lauren, could you tell us a few ways that medical records could be useful for the common, everyday patient?

Lauren: So, one of the main reasons for having your medical records, you can review them for accuracy. You can also access and compare any billing information and procedures that you've had so you can avoid unnecessary costs. Also, it makes sharing information between different providers or even switching providers a lot easier. It's also very beneficial because you can prevent getting tests that you don't need by comparing your information that you have right in front of you. You can see "I've already had that" or "I do need to have that test." You can also keep a current list of your immunizations and medications and keep your allergy information up to date. And, most importantly, it is your right to have access to your records. A lot of institutions now have access via MyChart and other electronic health records, so it's a lot easier to just kind of login into a portal and have access.

Sara: It's interesting that you mentioned the right to access records. That's something I feel it's easy to forget that you, as a patient, have the opportunity to reach out to your care providers and ask for this information. So let's say even someone like myself, how would I, or someone like me, go about requesting their records from a care facility?

Lauren: Absolutely. Well, first of all, the HIPAA act is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This, without boring you too much, it protects your medical records, your private information, and your identity, and it also gives you the right to have access to your records. So what a patient would do is to first fill out a care facility's form. Most facilities either have their own form you can fill out and do either mail, fax, or drop it off. Some places, you can even email it to them. If the office does not have a form, you can also write a letter containing all the necessary information. So there's a lot of templates for this also that can be found online, but more commonly than not, facilities will have their form for you. And then, after submitting your request, it usually takes about 30 to 60 days, on average, for patient requests. The facility may also require a fee for the records. Some charge for the electronic delivery. Others are also printed by page, so that will account for different fees as well

Sara: Now, thinking about those reasons that patients would want to gather their records, All4Cure does a lot of the heavy lifting for patients and collecting records for uses in making the dashboards. Lauren, can you talk a little bit about how All4Cure goes about gathering records for myeloma patients?

Lauren: Yeah. So the way the medical records are used here at All4Cure involves the patient giving consent via a HIPAA release form for us to receive their records. We request records from a patient's treatment location. This is mainly by fax or email, and then we will also follow up on the phone for pending requests and any outstanding requests. This takes the legwork out of the process for the patient, so they don't have to do anything else on their end once the release form has been completed.

Sara: How else is All4Cure helpful for patients in this way?

Lauren: One example that I can think of, an All4Cuse medical data specialist found an error in an MCV value from blood work, from another hospital's records. An MCV value can help to diagnose anemia as well as other health conditions. So All4Cure contacted the medical records department at this location, where the records came from and corrected the incorrect value. And this was really significant because it could've led to additional unnecessary tests or even misdiagnosis.

Sara: That's really amazing, definitely a rare case. Impressive, nonetheless, but it really shows that taking the time to kind of quote over medical records can be worth it in the long run and save people a lot of time. I know, Lauren, you work very closely with a lot of different records liaisons from different facilities. There are hundreds of facilities that our myeloma patients come from, and we actually had the opportunity to chat with one of those records people.

Sam Preciado: So, thanks for having me. My name is Samantha Preciado. I work at Northwest Medical Specialties. It's an oncology office here in Tacoma, Washington. Actually, there's several locations. So, I'm the medical records lead, and I started out wanting to be a nurse for a long time. And then, I realized I didn't like most body liquids or smells that came out of people. So, I changed my career path to medical sustain, a little bit less body fluids for the most part. And then I got a job in medicine here in Washington. I started doing that about eight years ago, almost now. I've been with Northwest for about four years. So, just like helping people in general in the health field has been my goal. I finally just went about it through the back office, rather than the front office kind of aspect.

Lauren: Definitely, I actually had a similar experience. I was also in nursing school and realized I kind of wanted to take it a little bit differently and then went back for health information and management. There's definitely different ways of helping people through health care that's not just nursing or doctors.

Sam Preciado: For sure, for sure. I really think that you know, medical records and health information is like the backbone. We really have to keep things going smoothly so that everyone else can do their job. So very important.

Lauren: Definitely. And can you tell us what some of your day-to-day responsibilities are like

Sam Preciado: Sure. So it's a little bit different for me because I'm the Lead. I check emails, I check our medical records inbox. I follow up on voicemails from patients or other offices. We send records. Any other office called to say, "Hey, this is our patient, we need less lab. Can you fax it to us?" kind of thing. So a lot of that. We have electronic faxes here that we kind of go through, and we kind of check every day. We get hundreds and hundreds of pages every day, thankfully digitally. But you know, sometimes you still have to print stuff out, but it's getting a lot easier as we're going into the more electronic records and just trying to not have as much paper. Hopefully, eventually, that happens in our lifetime.

Lauren: Yeah, definitely. And can you tell us what the average time it takes to complete a request, like if everything's normal and is going smoothly?

Sam Preciado: Sure. So usually, if it's not too many records, it's a few days, three to five days, I think is like the max that we do. Then, sometimes, we do send some of those to our third-party service called Medicopy. So they do a lot of our bigger requests because, you know, we're a small office, we can't do a thousand pages through the fax queue and things like that. So we have a little bit of help there. Usually, about three to five days is pretty normal.

Lauren: Are there any things that people can do to ensure that their records are delivered smoothly or quicker?

Sam Preciado: Definitely, I think most offices have a release of information document. So anything that would give access to other people to email communications, anything like that, makes it a lot more smooth. Especially if you have multiple people on there. Always have your spouse on there and then maybe one other person because, you know, you don't like to think about terrible things happen, but terrible things happen all the time. People don't still think about getting their records and how big of an issue it can be when someone passes, you know, things like that.

Lauren: Yeah. So we've definitely run into those kinds of issues also, and it can be really complicated when all the right paperwork is not readily available.

Sam Preciado: For sure, I think that's probably one of the biggest issues I see is that, you know, you guys are married for 50 years, but we didn't have any documents saying that we could release records to your spouse. So, I'm sorry, but we can't release records unless we have more complicated paperwork, just having everything already in place with other places. Other than, like, a law office makes it a lot easier for sure.

Lauren: And that kind of segues into our next question too. What are some of the other challenges that medical records coordinators face when trying to fulfill their requests?

Sam Preciado: Yeah, I mean, death is a big one. Like I said, if you don't have something on paper saying that we can release records, we can't really release records and you'll have to probably go into a lawyer's office saying that, you know, you're the executor of the estate and things like that. It just makes things a lot more complicated. If you have things in place with at least your spouse and maybe a friend or child, like whatever needs to happen, just so that you can get records after you pass. Because once you pass, it's a lot harder to say, "Yes, this person should have access to this" or "No, they can't." People change those things quite often too. Sometimes, you know, someone gets mad at their child, and then they have to update their legal paperwork. Just having those up-to-date really makes a huge difference, and it will make things much smoother for your family members once you pass or, you know, if you suddenly pass.

Lauren: Definitely. Is there anything else that you want to share with us about your position or that you want other people in the healthcare community to know about medical records?

Sam Preciado: Yeah, I think a lot of people think that maybe office staff doesn't have as much interaction with patients. And that's mostly true, but you know, at the end of the day, when we see someone who passes away so young, it's still really hard. We still really take those things to heart. You know, we don't like seeing patients pass away, even if they're 80 or 90 or 52. It just hurts. I think people need to give us that kind of grace because we also feel that too. When people pass or something bad happens to someone, it's just, you know, we feel it just as much as anyone else. I just feel like people should know that.

Sara: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Pod4Cure. If you or someone you know has Multiple Myeloma and would like to register with All4Cure for free, you can visit All4Cure.com.