I gave my patients 3 months notice of intent to close my practice and instructed them to come in and sign a records transfer sheet. We then burned their entire AC chart to CD and had the patient come pick it up, recording that records were released to the patient. It has been nearly a year since the closure and I have probably had only 5-6 requests for records from patients that procrastinated in getting their charts from me as I recommended. Those I have burned myself as the server now resides in my home.
There were several issues however:
1. When you ask to print the entire AC record, it seems like it is done in a disorganized fashion. I had to print everything to the Paperport desktop and then bundle them in a sensible fashion. You would think it would make sense for the Imported Items to print in the categories you had arranged them, e.g. labs, imaging, consults, etc.....they did not.
2. Secondly, many of the facilities to which the CDs were being taken were incapable of reading the CDs even though everything was in a PDF format. I thought at the time that was outrageous but, believe it or not, some of my old patients have followed me to my new practice and this large entity cannot transfer their records from the CD into their EMR. I have had to then print their records for them and send them down to "document management" where they are then rescanned into Epic.
3. All in all though, this was an easy, cost-effective way to give patients their records.
