Medical Records

California's powerful insurance lobby has quietly scuttled an effort to combat fraudulent medical billing that drains hundreds of millions of dollars from the state's workers' compensation insurance system. At issue was a proposal aimed at preventing billing scams backed by a task force of public and private employers, including Los Angeles County and Walt Disney Co. It would have required insurers to send notices to injured workers to check whether they actually received all medical services billed.

Los Angeles resident Rose Cohen says all she wanted was a copy of her laboratory test results. She'd been given a routine blood panel during an annual visit to her gynecologist and wanted to show the report to her internist. The results had already been returned to her gynecologist from the lab, meaning they were now legally part of her medical record. (In California, a laboratory cannot give patients their results directly unless the patient's doctor has given consent.

If, like Rose Cohen, you have trouble accessing your medical records, there are steps you can take to remedy the situation. First, contact your state medical board, says Joy Pritts, associate professor and director of the Center on Medical Records Rights and Privacy at Georgetown University. Many states have informal procedures that facilitate a quick resolution.

The Virginia Tech gunman's missing mental health records have been found at the home of a former university counseling official more than two years after the bloodbath. The belated emergence of Seung-hui Cho's file, a development disclosed in a memo obtained Wednesday by the Associated Press, represents another embarrassing lapse in the case and raises questions about how such evidence could be lost for so long.

Investigators trying to determine what killed Michael Jackson are seeking additional information from the personal physician who was with him when he died, the doctor's lawyer said Tuesday. Officials from the Los Angeles County coroner's office have requested another interview with Dr. Conrad Murray, who already has been questioned twice by Los Angeles Police Department detectives, said Murray's lawyer, Edward Chernoff.

Wow. I've just taken care of three patients in 12 minutes, and I didn't do it by "churning" them through my office as if it's some sort of factory assembly line. Rather, those patients (their parents, more specifically -- I'm a pediatrician), e-mailed me over a secure network with questions and descriptions of signs and symptoms. One mother attached a digital photo of a rash on her 3-month-old daughter's face; it turned out be nothing more serious than baby acne (it'll go away in a month or so).

As the paparazzi trailed his movements, a top Los Angeles County coroner's investigator probing the death of Michael Jackson went to the pop star's longtime dermatologist's office Tuesday to collect additional medical records. Coroner Assistant Chief Ed Winter visited Dr. Arnold Klein's Beverly Hills office after the physician failed to turn over records he had promised to provide to authorities earlier this month, said Craig Harvey, operations chief for the coroner's office.

Americans like to complain about the healthcare system, but they're unnerved by many of the proposals for improving it. More than 90% of those surveyed last fall by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions said that healthcare costs are a threat to their personal financial security, and 80% gave the system a mediocre grade or worse.

Investigators trying to determine how Michael Jackson died are faced with the daunting task of creating an accurate medical biography for a superstar whose ailments, surgeries and doctors have been tabloid fodder for three decades. Jackson has seen more than a dozen doctors since 1993, according to various public records and accounts, and investigators are now collecting as much medical data about him as possible.

Accessing your own medical records should be as easy as checking your online bank account, a new health-data group contends, and Monday it launched a website to promote better access. The site, HealthDataRights.org, was established by a group that is boosting greater personal use of electronic medical records. Only 15% of physicians track the records electronically, said James Heywood, a group founder.