Hi, my name is Bernice Zander, Director of Health Information Management at Tahoe Forest Health System, and I’m here to talk to you today about how you might receive your medical records if you need to get them for your own purposes or purposes outside the system.
There are a few different ways that you can access your records. On our Tahoe Forest Health System website, if you click on the link for patients and then medical records, we have the Release of Information Authorization Form in both English and Spanish versions. It’s a PDF fillable form, so it’s very easy to access, fill out, and send back to us. All of our contact information is at the top of that form.
We require this anytime a patient wishes to obtain their own medical records or asks us to send their medical records outside of our system to a third party. It could be another provider, an insurance company, an attorney, or whomever.
You can also call our office and we can send that form to you over email if you prefer. We can release your information in several different formats. We can email your information, fax it, or put your medical records on a flash drive. Patients have various ways they want to receive it, and we try to accommodate as much as we can.
If you see an outside provider and they need your medical records, all they have to do is submit a request on their fax cover sheet to us. Give us your name, your date of birth, and what records they need, and we’ll fax those or email them over as well. We can also send by United States Postal Service, though that takes a little extra time.
Additionally, you have this neat little function within your MyChart app called Share Everywhere. If you go into your MyChart app and click on Share Everywhere, it gives you a website. You give that website to your provider, and it generates an access code. The provider puts that code in and then has access to all of your medical records. They can save them, print them, and upload them into their own electronic medical record in their office. This makes continued care much easier.
You can also request your medical records through your MyChart account if you choose. That’s a relatively new function within MyChart. If you need records that you don’t see in your account, you can go in, click on Release of Information or Request Medical Records, put the information in there, and let us know what you need. We’ll send those records back to you through your MyChart portal.
My name is Bernice Zander, Director of Health Information Management at Tahoe Forest Health System. Feel free to reach out to us at any time.
