How To Request Your Free Medical Report Disclosures

Specialty Consumer Reporting Agencies: Medical Reports

This is the fifth installment in my series about how to request your free consumer reports from specialty agencies. You can read the series starting here.

There are several nationwide companies that collect and report medical-related information about consumers. Given how important your medical information is, it’s pretty astonishing that medical information reporting is practically in the dark ages when you compare it to credit reporting. In other words, there are no nationwide bureaus that collect and report comprehensive medical records for consumers in the same way that the nationwide CRA’s do for credit. With a number of companies competing to provide electronic medical records, though, we may get to that point eventually.

Also keep in mind that while the Fair Credit Reporting Act gives you the right to a free annual disclosure of your information from any nationwide consumer reporting agency, this right does not include companies that only collect information about their experiences with you. So your own doctor’s medical records, for example, aren’t covered by that law.

[Resource: Get Your FREE Credit Report Card]

There are three agencies from which you can request your free annual disclosure:

Medical Information Bureau (MIB)

This agency collects information that is used by underwriters who are evaluating applications for life, health or disability insurance policies. Don’t expect every detail of every visit you’ve made to a health care provider in the past several years to be in this file, however. It won’t be. Only “medically significant” information reported in the underwriting process will be included.

And you’ll only have an MIB file if, during the last seven years, you’ve applied for individually underwritten life, health, or disability income insurance. In other words, if you’ve been working at a job with health insurance for a while, chances are MIB will tell you there is no report available about you. In addition, MIB requires member companies to get your permission before supplying your information to them.

Igenix Medpoint and Milliman IntelliScript

These firms specialize in electronic prescription histories. Information about prescriptions you have had filled in the past five years may be found in their databases, or it may not be. As with the MIB report, if you haven’t applied for individual health, life or disability insurance, there will likely be no report about you. And, again, your written authorization will be required first.

While I have applied for individual health insurance in the past five years, and I’ve had prescriptions filled during that time, neither of these companies had a report on file for me.

Although the FTC in 2007 ordered Igenix and Milliman to provide free annual disclosures under the FCRA, I found it difficult to get information from Igenix about their MedPoint reports, and could find no information on their website about how to request a disclosure. You’ll have to call the number below. The other two, MIB and Intelliscript, do a better job of explaining their services and allowing you to request a disclosure through their websites.

MIB: 866-692-6901, MIB.com
Milliman IntelliScript: 877-211-4816, or Rxhistories.com
Igenix MedPoint: 888-206-0335

Read the full series on Specialty Consumer Reports here:

Part I : Introduction
Part II: Checking History Reports
Part III: Insurance Reports
Part IV: Employment Reports
Part V: Medical Reports
Part VI: Tenant / Rental History Reports

Image by MC4 Army, via Flickr