If you have a personal injury lawsuit against another party, they will want to obtain relevant facts regarding your medical condition(s) as they pertain to the case, and they’ll do that through a subpoena for your medical records. Unfortunately, this sometimes results in a request for all of your medical records – even those that do not pertain to the case.
A subpoena is a summons by a court to compel testimony or produce evidence. The other party only needs the records that are relevant to your injuries resulting from the incidents in question. To seek more than that is a violation of your privacy, and you should seek to avoid having your medical records unnecessarily distributed.
The other party is not entitled to all of your records. If the other party requested all of your records, then you should speak to an attorney to remedy this. Attorneys can file a Motion to Quash in response to this situation. While subpoena language is often very broad, these medical record requests are supposed to be narrowly prescribed to protect privacy rights and not discourage legitimate lawsuits for fear of loss of privacy.
Sometimes the subpoena will be limited to relevant records for the case, but the medical personnel may wrongly provide them all of your information. This needs to be prevented, as well. In our office, we handle that by calling the doctor’s office ahead of time to prepare them for the subpoena, and we let them know there will be a problem if extra information is provided to the other party. Watch the video to learn more.
If you have additional questions about medical records and your accident case, I want you to call me at (559) 702-5124. I welcome your call. Visit our educational website at www.NunesLaw.com for more videos and media content from our law firm.