The New Jersey legislature drafted and passed, and Gov. Murphy recently signed into law, Senate Bill 2253 which deals with medical record reproduction costs. While this is not a bombastic change, especially in light of the legal upheavals that we experience on a near-daily basis right now, it will have a significant impact for New Jerseyans, especially the injured workers I represent.
Under the old status quo, when my clients go to an emergency room after an accident, or treat on their own when a carrier ignores their pleas, I eventually request these records and have them reviewed by experts to either a) get them more treatment, or b) secure them a financial award for their loss of function.
The cost of those records is significant; $1 per page plus search fees, mailing costs, and myriad other ways to beef up the charges. These costs were inevitably passed along to the injured worker, who could have hundreds of dollars of their judgment or settlement go to medical record costs. I won’t even get into the very lucrative business of middlemen who may or may not charge correctly regardless of the law.
Under the new law, under most circumstances, the cost of a patient’s records for someone like me is $50 max, a $20 search fee and shipping, and a separate cost for diagnostics, if applicable (up to $30/DVD plus a $10 admin fee).
It may seem like small potatoes, but I just paid $110.73 for a 93 pages of records for one particular client last month. That would have been at least $30 less under the new law; that’s $30 back in the pocket of a New Jersey worker who is only paying for records because he was denied the care he was supposed to get under the law to begin with. Considering that there are nearly 150,000 industrial accidents in New Jersey each year, with about 35,000 formal claims filed, and many records are significantly larger than 93 pages, the impact overall is likely to be dramatic.
This is a small win for each New Jersey worker, which adds up to a big win for us all.