Personal injury cases have significant expenses, especially medical malpractice cases. Experts, depositions, discovery, travel, and the list goes on. One of the expenses just got more affordable, meaning potentially more money for our clients. You can imagine how expensive retrieving all the medical records from the hospital could be. Until recently, medical records were subject to a forty cent initial processing fee, plus another forty cents per page. In other words, if you needed a paltry 100 pages of medical records, it would cost you $57.05. If you needed your complete medical record and it was 2000 pages, you would have to pay $817.05!
Senate Bill 62 has amended Missouri Statute 191.227, which has provided some relief to these litigation expenses charged by the health care providers. Under the new statute, the maximum fee is $25 if the records are paperless and your attorney requests the records to be in an electronic format. The new law states: "If the health care provider stores records in an electronic or digital format, and provides the requested records and affidavit, if requested, in an electronic or digital format, not more than five dollars plus fifty cents per page or twenty-five dollars total, whichever is less."
Therefore, if your personal injury lawyer has a system in place to view your records electronically, you can save a lot of money, as the expenses in your case are significantly lessened.