Sorry, I'm not answering your question but I do have one for you or anyone else. I too am going to NJH later in May and I just received my appointments, and they only have me scheduled for 5/20 and 5/30? The 2 initial appointments on 5/20 is with Lab (blood test?) and Financial Services. I have a Medicare supplemental insurance-and I was under the assumption it was covered by my insurance. Can you or someone give me an idea of the costs and if they will add more appointments later? I'm coming from AZ and thought I needed to be in Denver from 5/20-5/30? Just confused about the process.

Ah. I see. While we shouldn’t assume, it does sound odd and very frustrating if all your past history, visits, labs and results aren’t taken into consideration for the final picture. Additionally doesn’t make sense to repeat those. Hopefully someone who has been there can provide more insight.

@dispatchpat I am in the same boat. I agree that the communication about medical records is vague. I pushed the issue and was told the best thing to do was to physically bring my records with me on disc. Cannot be flash drive, only disc. I don’t even own computer parts that will burn or read discs anymore but I spoke with my local doctor and he explained their records department can burn to disc, there is something security related that prohibits flash drives. Honestly my medical records the past 7 months are DEEP, and I have my doubts that anyone but me would weed through all that. I got a list from NJH of the general list of foundational testing they do (depending on results, additional tests may be ordered). I have had most of that testing in the past 7 months, so I plan to pull out and organize my past results for those tests specifically so they are easy/quick to refer to. I will add that I was told that NJH wanted testing to be done within 2 months of visit, and given the wait time most of my test results will be older than that. For me, I don’t mind repeating blood work from four months ago, but I am not going to repeat a barium swallow test from three months ago that was normal. I don’t need any more radiation than absolutely necessary at this point. So that’s one thing to be aware of and to give thought to (the timing element), what tests are you willing to repeat and what tests are you comfortable relying on past results. There is certainly a balance there, I understand NJH wanting up to date information for the best sense of where the patient is in that moment, but certainly some tests are one and done (e.g. cystic fibrosis testing) and others present risk (bronchoscopy, imaging) so I think it will depend on one’s own circumstances whether it makes sense to repeat testing that was done recently but more than two months ago. With that said, even where testing will be repeated, to me, it’s important to see trends over time, so past records remain relevant, particularly CT’s and PFT’s. But if you want to be certain that they have past records, I recommend following the suggestion I was given and bring them with you, especially imaging. If you find a better/easier way, I would love to know!