BUSINESSYour practice is closing. Where will the medical records go?Confusion and problems at other clinics highlight the need to know what will happen to patients' records if a practice breaks up.By Julie A. Jacob, amednews staff. April 16, 2001. When a medical group shuts down due to bankruptcy or other reasons, it's important to have a plan in place to ensure that patient medical records are either transferred to the patients' new physicians or stored for several years in compliance with state and federal regulations. If the medical group's physicians and administrators don't have a procedure in place, the result can be chaos, as the situations with KPC Medical Management in Southern California and the Casa Blanca Clinic in Gilbert, Ariz., illustrate. When KPC Medical Management declared bankruptcy in November 2000 and abruptly shut down, the medical records of 250,000 KPC patients were left sitting in the group's clinics. After the California Medical Assn. wrote a letter to the state Dept. of Managed Health Care in January, the health plans that contracted with KPC agreed to pay to have the records pulled and distributed to the former KPC patients' new physicians. "It was a huge, contentious issue," said Aileen Wetzel, CMA's associate director of managed care and medical staff issues. "We received numerous calls from physicians. ... Physicians and patients didn't know what happened to the patient records." Although the CMA maintained that the health plans had an obligation under state law to pay for the transfer of the records to the patients' new physicians, the health plans contended that it was the KPC physicians' responsibility to transfer the records to their patients' new doctors. The health plans agreed to pay for it simply to "help out," said Bobby Pena, the California Assn. of Health Plans' spokesman.
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Copyright 2001 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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