To JBS and James (and anyone interested in medical records custodianship -- which I confess never entered my mind prior to the decision to retire):
James hasn't described exactly what he is doing in "converting all the data to a PDF file" -- at least I haven't seen it if there was such a post.
If that means that everything in each chart is converted to one giant PDF file, then I can't see how it will be very useful to the next doctor's office. I have received a few "records transfers" like that over the years, and it turns out to be so tedious to sort through all the extraneous stuff to get at what we really need that we usually give up. Presumably, that would be necessary if you were defending a legal case or a Medicare audit, but most doctors offices I can imagine would only want a subset of all the information in each chart..
AC makes it pretty easy for a clerk to print the "clinical summary" and a selection of visit notes, consult notes, lab and imaging reports, etc. to a file which can be saved on a USB stick for faxed, and so far, no receiving physician has complained about our records transfers. We are assuming that most of the records transfers will occur in the first 2-3 months after closing the office, and we are planning to have such a clerk on staff for about that long. After that, I guess I become the clerk -- but I have long since realized that we seem to have gone to medical school to become not "physicians", but clerk-typists, data entry clerks and "PCP's"
Faxing is very old technology of course and at fax speeds it would take a very long time and probably jam up the receiving fax with some of our charts that could easily run to a couple of hundred pages if printed directly to paper. A large PDF file could of course be sent by email -- but it isn't "secure" and not everyone has secure messaging, so the default is fax.
I will likely contact James at some time after the mad scramble of closing the clinic is over.
thank you all for your interest and your posts.
