Medical Records

[Rebecca]

I have moved 3 times since I had long term medical care at KCMO vet hospital.I attempted to locate my hematologist DR Agarwal who has moved away and hospital has no idea where he went.I need to find certain things in chart-his handwriten notes are illegible,I'm a nurse and use to this,his are really bad.Part of my claim rests on non treatment of problems.I was also treated by IV team and there seems to be no record of this.I thought I could get around this by requesting pharmacy records for the time-they show nothing about IV solutions administered by IV team.I know exactly what records I want-where would they be now (8years) and how do I get them?

[Berta]

Have you made a formal request for copies of all medical records from the VA?

ALso- did you ever apply for SSA or SSI-they too might have copies of your past medical records.

[john999]

I have read that sometimes you must ask the hospital where you were treated for all the records even if you were in active service. I got all my records from hospital stays in the Army. I did not get records from a psychiatrist who treated me for 6 months before I got out of the Army. They disappeared off the face of the earth. I wrote the Army base where I was treated and they told me to try St. Louis. The doc probably threw them in the trash since he was a miserable creep.

[luvHIM]

When you say "vet hospital" I presume that is a VAMC, correct? If so, every VAMC has two departments that oversee your VAMR. One is the "Release of Information" office or as it is known on here the "Freedom of Information" office. Then there is also a department (normally in a remote part of the VAMC) that maintains a hard copy of your VAMR by file system. You can ask them at Release of Information where they are located.

Most hospitals, as you probably well know since you are a nurse, do not send records to an outside archive for at least 10 years and you are still within that time frame.

So, if you had long term care and you were actually hospitalized and administered an IV, it would definitely be of major concern to me that those records were no where to be found. Lastly, I tracked a Doctor I had been seen by at one of my duty stations via the web by entering the information that was on one of my progress reports in my SMR and I located the person. So, it is worth a try, as mentioned below by someone else.

Edited April 1, 2008 by luvHIM