About My Medical Release

If you have a personal injury claim in North Carolina, at some point you’re almost certain to have to sign a medical release. Let’s talk about mine, in particular.

As your personal injury attorney, part of my job is to get your relevant (and sometimes irrelevant) medical records and treatment bills for the purpose of valuing and negotiating the settlement of your personal injury claim. These documents are the backbone of your claim and I am virtually powerless to do anything to resolve your claim without them. So how do I get them? That’s where the release comes in.

Congress passed the HIPAA legislation several decades back in an effort to standardize the handling of sensitive health information. In my opinion, it’s really only made things fuzzier, more complicated, and frankly more frustrating without giving any actual protection to patients, but that’s neither here nor there. The important bit is that medical releases have to comply with HIPAA, which sound simple, but trust me, it ain’t.

There’s a whole bunch of silliness that the release has to state (that in my opinion doesn’t really educate you on the process nor is it really relevant to most scenarios), but what really makes it horrible is that health care providers often have different interpretations of these rules. Many times, they are of the belief that only their release is HIPAA compliant and no other release can possibly work. This is nonsense, but it’s something we face.

Having said all that, my release has been found by countless providers to be compliant, but it’s compliant because it says what it has to say. I didn’t draft the law, so please don’t hold me to account for it. The release is drafted that way because we want it to comply with HIPAA, so we’re stuck with it. It’s way more complicated than it needs to be, but here we are. For me to do what you’ve hired me to do, I need you to sign the release.

One question I often get about my release is, “Why do you need access to records/bills from birth to death when we’re only really interested in stuff from the accident?” so let’s talk about that…

First, the release has to say what I have access to, and the broader, the better. As I mentioned above, people who work for medical providers, despite the fact that none of them are lawyers, LOVE to put their own twist on what the wording of HIPAA regulations mean. This means that if I’m asking for something that they think isn’t included in my release, they may arbitrarily shut down my request. The release is broad to make this less likely to happen.

Second, every case and client are different. Sometimes I have a 2 year old client and I will literally need everything from their birth forward. Other times that is not the case. But once again, being broad helps to keep my release from getting shot down.

Finally, though the majority of my cases don’t require litigation, sometimes they do. Once we file suit we will go through what’s called the Discovery process. In Discovery, the defendants have a right to review your medical history, and depending on the context that might mean 5 years back or 10 years or further. Already having a release signed that covers that will simply save us both time and headache and paperwork if we get there. It’s just more expedient. Please trust me when I say I have PLENTY of medical records to review on a daily basis. I’m not fishing through your history for fun.

Hopefully that helps you to understand why my medical release says what it says. As always, I’m happy to talk to you about it. Call me at 919-929-2992.