Getting Hospital Records of Surgery

There are numerous sites on the web that address this question, and cite the HIPAA provisions that apply.

The first link below seems like a good, quick how-to-do-it site. It's a couple of years old but still relevant. Read that one first.

The second link is to an official document from HHS that answers your question in much greater, but complicated, detail. It also has a good Q&A section at the end, but, again, is much more complex than the first link, the sum-it-up one.

The how-to-do-it site:

health.usnews.com/health-news/patient-advice/articles/2014/06/05/how-to-get-access-to-your-hospital-records

Official HIPAA description from HHS:

www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance/access/

Your records will likely be very easy to obtain. You obviously have a right to them; all you have to do is ask. You certainly can obtain your surgical report directly from your surgeon's office, and you may also be able to get any others associated reports which were generated at the time through them, too. Since everything is a la carte these days, you will likely have to pay for your report, too. My most recent surgery was also about 2 years ago, and I had to pay...a whopping $0.49 per page to have the 4-page report emailed to me. $1.96 for the whole thing...but I only requested the operation report.

Just call the doctor's office and ask for the Records person/department. Some organizations have "farmed out" the process of distributing medical records to a 3rd party who specializes is this. Obviously, you will have to verify your identity, which means you may have to go in person...but it all starts with an easy phone call.

To obtain your medical records, call the hospital or clinic where you had your surgery and ask for medical records release department. Tell them you want copies of all the reports and records from the day of your surgery. They will then let you know how long it will take to get the ready copies for you(sometimes a couple days). Then you will need to sign for them when you pick them up. They should not give you any trouble.

Elgin, I would go to the hospital administrator and ask them one more time for the records, including the video of the surgery itself which I'm sure the daVinci robot automatically captures..If they are still unresponsive, tell them the next request will be from your lawyer...I found this quote in a description of the daVinci surgical robot..." Video is recorded at up to 30 frames per second from the DVI output of the da Vinci master console using an Epiphan DVI2USB device. Video is encoded using mpeg-4 compression to produce compact, manageable files."

You want a copy of that file...