Thousands of times a day, at health systems throughout the US, workers manually search for patient medical charts, print them out on paper, or save them to a file—and then fax, mail, or email them to a payer or third party who has requested it. The productivity for this often manual approach is about five charts an hour per worker, and the average cost to retrieve a medical record varies by state, health system, and the number of pages. The cost per medical record ranges from about $25 to upwards of $100. Not only is this expensive, it’s also not exactly accurate or efficient. On average, it takes about three weeks for a requested chart to be delivered.
