How to Order Your Medical Records

Every patient who is treated by a health care professional in Missouri has a right to receive a copy of their medical records — Missouri Revised Statutes §191.227.

Under the law, the doctor or hospital has a right to ask you to sign an authorization to get the records, and to charge you a reasonable fee for finding and copying those records, but they must give you the records if you ask properly.

An authorization is a statement from you allowing the health care provider to release your medical records. There are a wide variety of authorizations for medical records which can be used and if you’re ordering the records for yourself there are not many concerns.

To make sure you comply with the law and get your records, follow these simple steps:

1. Call the healthcare provider or visit their webpage and ask them how to get a copy of your records and how to do it in the least expensive way. If the office or hospital is big enough they will often publish procedures to get medical records on their web site. Even smaller medical offices often have authorizations they prefer to use and many will send you the authorization to sign and send back.

   If the provider doesn’t have their own authorization, you can use the sample authorization below to send with your request. You can either print the authorization out and fill in by hand, or click here for an online fillable version of the form. If you use the fillable form, you may still need to sign a hard copy of the filled-out authorization to send to the provider. We believe this sample form is compliant with the federal HIPAA law which governs authorizations but we cannot guarantee the form will work under every circumstance.

   Medical Records Authorization Form 

   Below are links to the webpages of some of the larger providers of health care in the St. Louis area. You should start here if you are looking to order your medical records from any of these providers.
   Barnes-Jewish Hospital
   Washington University Physicians
   SSM Hospitals
   Mercy Hospitals
   Missouri Baptist Hospital
   St. Luke’s Hospital
   Christian Hospital

2. Send the provider a written request. Make a written request for your records and you should use the written request to tell the healthcare provider exactly what you want.

   You should ask for an electronic copy of the records if they are available. You are entitled to an electronic version, and when requested in writing, a federal law called HITECH, 42 U.S.C. 17935 (e) and 45 C.F.R. 164.524, limits what they can charge, but the cost may range from a few dollars to around one hundred dollars. In general, electronic records are cheaper to get and easier to share with others.

   You should also specify in your request what parts of your medical records you want copied. Ask for all records if you are getting them electronically. If you have to have paper, and you were hospitalized or treated for an extended period of time, asking for all records can be an expensive proposition. You may need to pick “parts” of the record. To see what the typical “parts” of a hospital record contains to try and narrow your request, see our sample request for records.

In some cases it is also important to ask for radiology imaging that is available and part of your chart. Radiology imaging is the actual pictures taken of you by an x-ray, MRI, CT, PET, ultrasound or other similar machine. The images themselves are different from the radiology reports which are paper entries in the chart from the radiologist explaining their interpretation of the images. To get the radiology imaging you may have to submit a separate request, and pay a separate fee. But, the imaging is often easier to get than the records and will, these days, almost always come on a CD-ROM.

For an example of medical records requests that we use for different circumstances, click the links below. Remember that while we believe our requests are compliant with Missouri and Federal law, we cannot guarantee these requests will work under every circumstance.