Has anyone requested their late spouse's medical records? Any experiences with that you want to share?
I'm thinking about it for a couple reasons, but also feels macabre.
View all comments
Are you talking about post- or antemortem records?
All postmortem records should be made available to you, without charge.
In my state - All medical records from before death are harder to get ahold of. Once the medical system has been notified of the death, you cannot get them without proper paperwork, because “how will the medical facilities know who should receive the records.”
You need to go through probate or, if there is no other next of kin, have a special appointment made by a judge and submit the paperwork to every medical entity that was involved in their care, including pharmacies. The special appointment is much, much cheaper than probate, but you need an attorney to do the paperwork.
I wish I had known, because there was a short window of time where I could log in to my spouses medical portals and could have downloaded info. Nobody tells us these things!
Good luck!
Ugh how frustrating about that small window of time! We are in Alaska and didn't have a very good e health set up to begin with.
Antemortem. That all makes sense, thank you for the input. I'll look into our state's specific laws. I was his spouse and our kiddos are little, no probate etc, so a special appointment type thing would work.
Not sure I will, lots of reasons I might, one being kids were so tiny when we lost him, I am trying to make sure I have anything they might wonder about when they're older. I've kept more of his things for that reason too, since I just don't know yet what might be meaningful. (That sounds kind of odd for medical records, but like my late husband was a paramedic, applying to PT school. He would've wanted to see records if something like that had happened to his dad)
None of this sounds odd to me at all. We discovered that my husband had a rare and undetected arterial blockage that should have shown up on standard exams, but it didn’t. I set up a fund to pay for his relatives to have a special test, and so far they all have the same issue and a few were pretty serious.
Sometimes it pays to find out, but you don’t know until you check.