Federal court rules against fee restrictions for third-party medical record requests

Healthcare organizations will no longer face a cap on fees they can charge third parties to access health records.

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta issued Memorandum Opinion on January 23 vacating provisions of the 2013 Omnibus Rule and informal guidance published in 2016, which expanded rights of access for third parties at the patients’ request and placed a limit on the amount a third party could be charged for records.

Mehta deemed parts of the rule to be impermissible under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Following the ruling, HHS announced on January 28 that the fee limitation “will apply only to an individual’s request for access to their own records, and does not apply to an individual’s request to transmit records to a third party.”

Previously, covered entities could not charge third parties a flat fee exceeding $6.50. Covered entities also had the option of calculating the actual allowable costs to fulfill each request or using a schedule of costs based on average allowable labor costs to fulfill standard requests.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed by Georgia-based Ciox Health in January 2018. Ciox believed aspects of the 2016 guidance were “arbitrary and capricious,” according to the court order. The court agreed, lifting the restrictions on charges to third parties.