A reviewing physician works from documents. If a report is missing, they will either ask for it — which costs days — or answer from incomplete information, which is worse. Preparing the set properly is the single highest-leverage thing you can do.
What to gather
- Discharge summaries from every hospital admission in the last five years.
- Imaging on the original media or in DICOM format. Photographs of a screen are usually unreadable and will be rejected.
- Pathology reports, including the block or slide reference if a re-read is possible.
- Laboratory results with the reference ranges printed on them. Ranges differ between laboratories.
- A current medication list, with doses and start dates.
- A one-page chronology: what happened, when, and at which institution.
Translation
Records are translated by medical translators, not by machine translation alone. Numbers, units and drug names are the places where automatic translation fails most often, and they are the places where a mistake matters most.
You keep control of the originals
Send copies, never originals. You can withdraw the authorisation to transmit your records at any time, and we will stop the transfer.
Can I send records by messaging app?
For the initial enquiry, yes. For the clinical review itself we ask for the documents on a channel where access is logged and the file is encrypted at rest.
What if I do not have a pathology report?
Tell us. In some cases the hospital can request a re-read from the original block; in others the review will proceed without it and say so explicitly.