Wellness

[meem120]

Sometimes offices have a set day to do these kinds of things.  Like every other Friday or whatever.  Depends on the office, but like disability forms etc, these things cannot be done instantly.

[chrystaltree]

@meem120 

Yes!  You are so right.  My friend who is PCP pays a retired former employee  to come in every other week on a Saturday morning to fax records and forms.  She can't spare her medical assistant or her office manager for something like that.   

[Lipstickdiva]

I have to request medical records from doctors and hospitals all the time for work.  Many of these facilities use an outside service to process any records requests.  It's not out of the norm for the requests to take 30+ days to be processed.

Many times if a practice handles their own records, it takes even longer because the office is swamped.

[RedTop]

I agree that a medical office doesn’t sweat it, or take it personally when a patient wants their record sent to another doctors office.   They deal with it every day.   

The volume of faxes that come thru an office like that daily takes a lot of time to sort, file, and/or follow up on.   The person who pulled the fax may not be the person who actually handles the task of faxing the patient record.   The request could sit on a desk for days before the job is done.

It was my responsibility in my last job to pull all the faxes first thing in the morning and get them where they needed to be.  Between the CEO and 5 executive officers, it was not unusual to have 40+ faxes come in after the office closed.   The real fun was walking in and finding the majority of them on my desk, which meant someone stayed late to get the fax they were expecting and had shuffled thru the entire stack to get theirs.   It always took longer to sort and make sure all pages were there, compared to me pulling them from the machine in order.

[Anonymous032819]

It is entirely possible that the fax didn't go through.

It happens all of the time.

I seriously doubt that your former doctor is mad at you for leaving and is trying to scr*w you over.

Patients come and go all of the time.

You are just another patient.

No more or less special than all of the other patients.

[trenet]

I am not changing doctors, but, I have been collecting reports and scans to take for additional consults - it has been difficult.  

My oncologist sent me to a surgical consult and now, is sending me to another oncologist at a different medical hospital to discuss other options.

Some of the doctors want dvd’s of scans and MRI’s, others have electronic access to the some information but, not everything they want/need.    There also seem to be a variety of authorizations too. 

Gathering everything up has been difficult and now, when I need them and time is important, I am scrambling to get everything, 

I haven’t always gotten copies during my 26 years of cancer treatments  and I regret it.  I always planned to put together a sort of medical “C.V” - I sure wish I had.

Remember to get copies of tests, reports and DVDs at the time of the procedures.