Having a trained paralegal oversee records retrieval tasks is so much better than the service you are going to get from a national records retrieval company. I should know, as I have used many of these national services before and have firsthand working experience in how my firm can do it better.

By using IJD Paralegal Services, LLC, patients get a dedicated third-party designee who will request individual right of access for electronic records for $6.50 per record or the actual labor cost, pursuant to the access provisions of the Privacy Rule at 45 C.F.R. § 164.524, and who will fight the typical facility fees quoted per O.C.G.A. § 31-33-3:

Search, Retrieval and Other Direct Administrative Costs	Up to:	$25.88
Certification Fee	Up to Per Record:	$9.70
Copying Costs for Records in Paper Form	Per page for pages 1-20	$0.97
	Per page for pages 21-100	$0.83
	Per page for pages over 100	$0.66

This can save you anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars per facility’s production! I recently received an invoice from an Atlanta metro hospital for $221.61 for 216 pages of records that should have been just $6.50 (or the actual labor cost). Patients should not have their settlement money eaten away by reimbursement of unnecessary medical records production costs!

Other benefits of having a paralegal third-party designee over a traditional national records retrieval service:

• Our follow-up calendar is set for Day 31 of production. If a request is outstanding, we are calling without you having to ask us to follow-up with the facility!
• A paralegal is trained to look for production errors before time is wasted in transmitting the wrong patient record to you as a complete production. I cannot tell you how frustrated I used to get as in-house paralegal using a national records service when I would get a notice that my records had been uploaded, only to open the .pdf and find that the records were for the wrong patient; for the wrong dates of service; or even outright illegible. When confronted with these errors, do you know what these people had the gall to say to me? “Because that is how the facility produced it to us.”

I would then say: “Well, can’t you guys check this stuff before you alert me that my      records are in? I only want to know when the correct records are in. It doesn’t do me any good to think we’re writing a demand tomorrow because all of our records are in, only to click on your production and find Jennifer Smith’s ER records (not even one of our clients, by the way), in John Taylor’s file.” “Mrs. Whitmer, we don’t do that here. We only pass on what the facility sends us.”

 [Jamie Davis Whitmer takes a deep breath and her brain starts turning. We can do better than this.]

“Okay. It sounds like I need to branch out to a new area of service, because that’s what I need done here. I need what I requested to come through. If you can’t do that, what am I paying you for? I don’t need to pay a service provider to transmit incorrect information to me.”

We are now in the records business. We actually look at the production to make sure it matches the requested information before we pass it on to you as complete. WOW!

Other additional services:

• Add on bates-labeling.
• Add on a medical chronology and/or billing summary spreadsheet with memo re missing bills and other facilities treated.

Contact jamie@ijdparalegalservices.com to discuss pricing and service plans.