I think they need to make a law making it very clear that medical records belong to the patient. They should be required to provide copies to you, even if they have to give you a copy of everything for your files after every visit.
These laws already exist, though they are not strongly enforced. So, why do you have trouble getting your medical info? Well, first, as I said, it's not strongly enforced (yet). So, hospitals and clinics generally tend to put is as a back-burner issue. Compliance is much more concerned with accidental (or intentional) Medicare fraud than they are with patients taking an extra few weeks to get their documents.
Second, there are
much stronger laws against the production of documents without a proper authorization. Yes, I'm sure that everyone posting here has signed many authorizations, but did you look at what it/they said? Did it name the right entity? How long was the authorization good for? It can't be open ended, and generally, you need a new one every year (at the very least). Did it specify the documentation to be produced? If so, and you try to use it for something outside that scope/time period, you'll need to get another one. For example, if it said "all records to date", and you try to use is again 3 months later to get the interim records, you can't. Conversely, if it
didn't specify the documentation to be produced (or for example, said something like "all documents pertaining to XXX") that's a HUGE hassle for information departments. You're talking about, in some cases, decades worth of medical records - not all of which may have been digitized. Sometimes we go back to the requestor to try and save them money: "Hey, do you know you asked for approximately 500 pages of records? Do you know we're allowed to charge you $XXXX for producing those? Do you maybe wanna be a bit more specific in your request?" Also, those types of requests tend to implicate issues of state law. For example, in Michigan, there are protections for documents involving substance abuse disorders and sexually transmitted diseases which are stronger than the Federal protections, and require a
specific request. So, if an information department gets an open-ended request they have to go back to the requestor and ask for clarification: "Hey, ummm, you might not know this, but the agent you appointed in that massive class action suit you don't even remember agreeing to be a part of is asking for those records about the STD you had treated when you were 18. Are you cool with that?"
Third, it's expensive (see above). Yes, we're living in a digital world, and every hospital is doing its best to get everything put onto an electronic medical records system, but we aren't all there yet. So, what happens if we get requests for records that aren't digitized, BUT the requestor demands that the records be produced electronically (which they're allowed to do)? Well, we have to task one person to dig their physical records out of storage and digitize it. My employer is willing to do this, because we're one of the biggest hospital systems in the state. Anything smaller than us? Yeah, you're lucky if they even have a separate information management department. Also, when you start asking for
old records, they start being hard to find. Like literal random cardboard box in a football field sized warehouse hard to find. This super sucks for hospitals, because although we're allowed to charge for the time we spent making copies and/or converting information, we
can't charge (anymore) for the time we have to spend
looking for the records.
I'm sorry you guys have had a hard time getting your records, but it's not as if hospitals are greedily hoarding them for some nefarious purpose. Trust me, they wish they didn't have to keep paying for their secure storage for the length of the recommended regulatory retention periods. In all honesty, you've probably run upon some overworked/understaffed practices that just can't keep up with all the requests they get. Ultimately, these people are supposed to be healers, not paper pushers. Yes, it's their job to make sure you can all get copies of your records in a timely manner, but they don't always see it that way.
