Patients Told to Retrieve Their Records
A Boston-based company that has been storing 8 million Southern California medical records for former patients of a now-defunct managed-care company says it is no longer being paid and has considered destroying the documents.
Iron Mountain, which is warehousing and managing records for patients of KPC Medical Management at a facility in East Los Angeles, said that court-ordered funds for the storage project ran out last summer.
When KPC shut its clinics in November 2000, records for 250,000 patients and more than 1 million people affiliated with dozens of managed-care companies were locked inside.
It was the end of a long journey for some of the state’s pioneering medical practices -- groups started in Los Angeles in the 1920s as a way to provide affordable health care to working people.
When KPC closed its doors one Monday morning, patients waiting for test results, operations for their children and chemotherapy sessions were turned away.
Ordered by state regulators to make available the records needed by people in the midst of treatment, including pregnant women and cancer patients, California’s health plans put up more than $2 million in 2001 for distribution and storage.
The records were initially in the hands of a Georgia-based manager of health-care documents called Smart Corp., but in August 2001 the bankruptcy court handling the KPC case paid Iron Mountain to take over, according to Iron Mountain spokeswoman Melissa Burman. The company was paid to store the records and distribute them to patients who requested them for one year.
Burman said that Iron Mountain receives 300 to 400 requests each month, but that the records take up 300,000 cubic feet of space, at a cost of $350,000 per year. The company has considered destroying the records, she said, but has no immediate plans to do so.
Ed Kelley, a West Los Angeles resident who recently requested records for his son, who has Down’s syndrome, said he had been told by Iron Mountain employees in Los Angeles that the records would be destroyed as soon as next month.
“I was very upset,” Kelley said, adding that he had gone to the facility in East L.A. “and started yelling at them.”
Burman said she was unaware of plans to destroy the records in February. But she did say that a call from The Times on the matter had contributed to the company’s decision not to destroy the documents in the near future.
She urged former patients of KPC, MedPartners, Friendly Hills, Mullikin Medical Group and other successors to the pioneering Los Angeles Ross-Loos medical practice to request their records from Iron Mountain.
To obtain forms, patients should call Iron Mountain’s Los Angeles office at (213) 891-4143 or visit www.ironmountain.com. The company charges $21.50 to ship records to a home or to a doctor’s office.
The state Department of Managed Health Care, which originally ordered the health plans to store the records and reach patients who might need them, has no jurisdiction now that the records are at Iron Mountain, said Deputy Director Joy Higa.
Higa said that legislation proposed by the Davis administration would tighten rules regarding records when medical groups go out of business or doctors quit managed care. Similar legislation was introduced last year, but lawmakers were unable to reconcile versions passed separately by the state Assembly and Senate.
