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Several companies promising to provide medical records to attorneys with eye-popping speed are facing serious allegations of fraud. But the chief legal officer for a patient-driven platform that allows patients to share medical records with their attorneys says she spotted the red flags underlying the claims against those companies years ago.
Melanie Carpenter, chief legal officer for ChartSquad, said she was attending a legal conference years ago when a colleague told her about a vendor, which she did not name, promising attorneys that it could provide them their clients’ medical records “in minutes.”
Carpenter said she went to that vendor and asked how that company could deliver records so quickly. The company’s representative explained that it partnered with doctors to set up fake telehealth visits for attorneys’ clients, under the guise of continued care, which allowed the company to reach into electronic medical record systems and secure those records quickly.
“He said ‘Isn’t that brilliant?’ and I was like, no, that’s fraud,” Carpenter told CVN. “This isn’t going to work in the long-term and you can take all these attorneys down with you if they’re complicit in this.”
Indeed, Epic Systems, a leading medical records provider, has filed suit against a slate of companies, claiming that they fraudulently obtained electronic medical records, or EMR, from Epic’s system. The litigation is ongoing: at least one firm, Health Gorilla, has vehemently denied the allegations, while another, GuardDog Telehealth, admitted to accessing patient records under false pretenses, and resolved claims against them.
Carpenter told CVN that setting up phony health visits to secure medical records, if true, would not only constitute fraud, it would fail to secure a patient’s complete medical record database and ultimately pass a high cost of retrieving those records to the attorney’s client.
“They’re only getting what’s available on the EMR, which is not everything. It’s not sufficient,” Carpenter said. “And then the lawyer is going to take the costs out of a settlement or judgment. The patient just had to buy their own medical records.”
Moreover, because the patient themselves isn’t requesting the access, that uncapped charge can be exorbitant.
“All of this, if true, is illegal on so many levels,” Carpenter said.
She added that liability in this litigation may eventually spin beyond the companies themselves, with lawyers who used the companies finding themselves the target of lawsuits.
Carpenter said the litigation will likely lead to changes across the industry, regardless of who prevails.
“If Epic loses this case. That will open the door to a great deal of chaos in these systems,” Carpenter said. “If they win, there will be some tightening up here and new legislation will have to happen.
“But that’s how technology goes, right? You don’t know where to fill holes until they’re exposed.”
Spotting the Red Flags
Carpenter said it’s critical that attorneys vet a company before choosing it to access their clients’ medical records. She advises asking how long the company has been in business and where it's headquartered, as well as digging into just how those records are retrieved. Companies that solely rely on AI methods, for example, raise bright red flags.
“Haven’t we learned this lesson in law yet?” Carpenter asked. “You’ve got to oversee your robots. Don’t trust everything the robot says.”
But the most important key, Carpenter added, was using common sense.
“If it sounds too good to be true, then it is,” Carpenter said, noting claims of retrieving medical records for attorneys “in minutes” was too far-fetched to be reasonably believed. “It’s not real.”
A Patient-Centered Platform
While Carpenter said those records can’t realistically be delivered “in minutes,” attorneys can access medical records quickly and legitimately, simply by leveraging their clients’ own rights to that information.
ChartSquad is a pioneering app that allows patients to access their own medical records and seamlessly share them with anyone they choose, including their attorneys.
Attorneys sign up to ChartSquad’s platform for free, refer their clients to the portal, and the company does the rest, securing records and updating both attorneys and their clients as they’re delivered. Carpenter said the process cuts down on turnaround times, with firms receiving all of a client’s records within 15 days, on average.
And she said that efficiency, combined with statutory fee caps on those patient-requested records, mean significant cost savings.
Founded in 2012, ChartSquad is the first patient-based platform to allow patients to request and share their medical records with attorneys. That long history, and the platform’s own flexibility, have made it an industry leader in records retrieval, relied upon by the full range of firms, from solo offices up to the largest law practices in the country.
“ChartSquad is just helping the patients, clients, and attorneys enforce the laws that are out there to protect them,” Carpenter said. “That’s what we do.”
Learn more about how ChartSquad can help you.
