Most law firms underestimate the true cost of managing medical record retrieval internally. Here’s what it actually looks like when you break it down.
Most firms look at one number: the salary of the person sending requests.
But record retrieval isn’t a single task. It’s a process that touches multiple roles, consumes hours across your team, and creates hidden operational costs.
1. The Time Adds Up Quickly for Management and Employees
Record retrieval involves more than just sending a request. Each request typically includes 5 or more steps:
- Identifying and contacting providers
- Generating and sending requests
- Following up multiple times
- Paying the provider
- Receiving, organizing, and uploading records
Across the lifecycle of a single request, this often totals 1.5 to 2 hours of staff time. If one team member handles 50 requests per month, that’s 75 to 100 hours per month spent on retrieval efforts.
2. Follow-Up Is Where Delays Happen
Sending requests is straightforward. Consistent follow-up is straightforward. However, it’s quick to be put on the back burner when employees are juggling multiple roles. If the individual you have requesting records is juggling multiple responsibilities, the follow-up often gets delayed. When that happens Requests sit, Records take longer to arrive, and Cases slow down.
The result isn’t just inefficiency, it’s longer case timelines across your firm.
3. You’re Paying for Time. Not Just Results.
With an in-house model, you’re paying employees for time directly from the company’s pocket. That includes Time spent waiting on providers, Time between follow-ups, Time lost to competing priorities, and Time when there isn’t enough work to keep staff fully utilized.
This creates a constant tradeoff of being Overstaffed: Paying for idle or underutilized time or being Understaffed: Follow-up suffers and cases slow down. Either way, costs with record retrieval can become inconsistent and difficult to control.
4. Additional Operational Overhead, Don’t Forget about Management
Managing record retrieval internally requires the ongoing effort of hiring and firing, training staff on provider processes, managing performance and consistency, answering internal status questions, and handling/tracking all the associated expenses. These responsibilities pull time from leadership and add complexity to your operations.
5. The Opportunity Cost
This is the biggest cost and the hardest to measure.Every hour spent on retrieval is an hour not spent on:
- Moving cases forward
- Communicating with clients
- Increasing caseload capacity
You’re not just paying for the work, you’re losing what that time could produce elsewhere.
A More Predictable Approach
When record retrieval is outsourced, the model changes. Instead of paying for time, you pay for completed results.No cost for waiting or idle time. No need to balance staffing levels associated with record retrieval. No internal management of the process. The cost becomes predictable, consistent, and tied directly to results.
Every firm needs records. But handling the process in-house often costs more than it appears. A good question to ask is: Is this process in-house helping my firm move faster, or slowing it down?
If you’re curious what record retrieval is actually costing your firm, or what it would look like to offload the process. We’re happy to walk through it with you.