Ownership of the Medical Record
Even though the medical record is made up of data pertaining to the patient, the actual document belongs to the doctor. The medical record is in fact an aide developed by the doctor to reinforce patient care, and also benefits the practitioner. When a doctor quits working in a practice that has several doctors, the question of which doctor actually owns which chart may surface. Sadly, there isn’t an actual answer due to the fact that ownership usually relies on very particular data. Usually, to stay away from arguing regarding ownership of medical records, the doctors must come to an agreement before they enter into the multiple-doctor setting. If an agreement is not reached, the doctors will have to depend on basic business laws, and these types of arguments can end up being very ugly and expensive.
Normally, under state business law, work-related products of employees belong to the employers. With that being said, in a practice where one doctor employs another doctor, and a prior agreement is not made, the employee doctor usually will not own any of his/her patients’ charts; instead, the employer doctor does. Regardless of this, a state’s Medical Board rules state that the employer doctors have to give the employee doctors that leave the data needed to contact the consumers that this doctor has treated over the last two years. In a scenario where there is a partnership, the law usually states that any property that was obtained in a partnership is the property of all the partners. When a doctor’s partnership dissolves and there was no prior agreement made, ownership of the chart might rely on the circumstances regarding the dissolution. For instance, one partner might keep exhausting the partnership’s assets if he/she was not the cause of the dissolution and pays the doctor that is leaving the value of his/her share, and this includes the medical records.
When doctors, each in their own individual practice, share offices, there isn’t any legal combination that actually happens. The doctors actually have ownership of their own records separately. In my opinion, it is better to agree on which doctor owns the charts prior to having a disagreement. When just beginning a partnership, each doctor is very happy to be starting a new enterprise, and is usually more willing to agree on issues like this. This is the best time to reach an agreement. When a practice is dissolving, it is a lot harder to reach an agreement.
References
Who Owns the Medical Record. (2013). Retrieved from Texas Medical Association: http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=6334
