SOUNDING OFF: Law change needed on medical records

I have two important questions to ask my fellow citizens: 1) Are your medical records important to you? and 2) When is your doctor going to destroy your records?

I asked every staffer at the State Legislature that I could reach in Sacramento to answer those same questions “” and the answers were characteristically universal across party lines: 1) “Yes,” and 2) “I have no idea.”

How about some other questions: Do you know whether your medical records have already been destroyed? If a doctor asked you to take a test, would you know whether you have had that test before and whether it would be necessary to take it again?

Are you a cancer patient or know of one? If you had a recurrence of cancer, would you be able to treat with radiation again or have you had your maximum lifetime dose? The answer to these questions could only come with having one’s medical records. However, most people don’t think about such things because most people believe medical records can never be destroyed.

But such reasoning could have dire consequences, because it is simply wrong. My wife and I learned the hard way. When treated for a second bout with breast cancer she learned that some of her original medical records were destroyed. And yet others were not.

Records could tell us important things about the pathology of her tumor or whether she had received the maximum lifetime dose of radiation. I dare say most people would be shocked as my wife and I were to learn that although patients are entitled to obtain their medical records, their doctors may destroy the records at any time without any obligation to tell their patients when they’re going to destroy the records.

We learned that when it comes to medical records, medicine in California is practiced by chance. Is that how medicine should be practiced in California? I don’t think so.

I testified in Sacramento that we need a law, Senate Bill 1415, to inform patients about doctors’ medical records retention/destruction practices and to inform patients when their records are going to be destroyed.

Sen. David Cox (a Republican who voted for the bill) commented that he did not know that doctors had the right to destroy medical records. And he sits on the health committee.

SB 1415 is will be voted on in the State Assembly any day. It has passed the state Senate and five committees of the legislature on bipartisan votes.

Yet our own assemblyman, Chuck DeVore, is poised to vote “no” on SB 1415. As his staffer Rob Flanigan told me, it is because “philosophically” DeVore does not believe in state-imposed “mandates” on doctors. This is where I am afraid politics is rearing its ugly head. The only reason to oppose this bill is on arcane political ideological grounds “” not on good practical public policy.

If you care about medical records “” if you care about your medical records “” take a moment out of your day and give Flanigan a phone call. He advises DeVore. He may be reached at (916) 319-2070.

Your life may not depend on it today “” but it may in a few years.

ALAN BOINUS lives in Laguna Beach.