Police to offer patient records

Last month, doctors found a silver dollar-sized polyp in his colon and recommended removal before it becomes something more serious.

"If they don’t take care of it, it can lead to cancer," the 62-year-old Henderson man said.

But like thousands of patients of the Las Vegas endoscopy center at the heart of a hepatitis C outbreak, Siria can’t get records of his colonoscopy that doctors need to perform the operation.

"I’ve been on hold for three weeks now," Siria said.

The records were seized from six locations March 10 by the Las Vegas police and the FBI as part of a wide-ranging criminal investigation into the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada, which has been blamed by health officials for at least six potentially deadly hepatitis C infections because of unsafe medical practices.

The Southern Nevada Health District has recommended 40,000 clinic patients undergo blood testing for hepatitis and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

After spending the past week organizing and cataloguing the roughly 2,025 boxes of files, police announced Friday that patients can start requesting copies of their records on Monday.

Patients who need records can fill out a form at any of the Police Department’s seven substations across the valley.

They will be required to sign the form and provide a photo ID.

Patients should not mail in their requests, police said.

Patients who need records for an urgent medical matter, such as an impending surgery, will take priority over other requests, but police don’t know how long it will take to fulfill any requests, said Capt. Al Salinas, head of the Organized Crime Bureau.

"As nice and easy as it would be to tell you that we have every patient file in a box, in alphabetical order, and all (patients) have to do is bring an ID card to pick their records up, it’s not going to happen, unfortunately," Salinas said.

"Just managing the number of cases that we have, the number of file cases that we have, is monumental. And that’s an understatement," he said.

Patients should check with their primary-care doctors, because they might have access to many of the needed records, police said.

Also, some records, such as pathology reports, were not taken by investigators and remained at the medical offices, Salinas said.

Since the massive seizure, the Police Department has devoted as many workers and volunteers it could find to organize the thousands of patient records taken from the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada, 700 Shadow Lane, Desert Shadow Endoscopy Center, 4275 Burnham Ave., and all four valley locations of the Gastroenterology Center of Nevada.

"It’s all hands on deck," Salinas said. "This is a priority for our department.

"This is a priority for the community."

Police officials are considering hiring a medical records management company to take over the task, and they have consulted with University Medical Center records officials for advice, Salinas said.

"UMC is assisting Metro investigators in figuring out how to handle just the sheer volume of patient records," hospital spokesman Rick Plummer said. "They’re the law enforcement experts, and we’re the medical experts, and this is a case that really transcends both fields."

For Siria, news of the records request procedure might have come too late.

After weeks of getting the runaround, the retiree said he will probably just get a new colonoscopy, even if he has to pay for it himself because his insurance company won’t cover a second one.

"I’m not going to wait," he said.

Review-Journal writer Lawrence Mower contributed to this report. Contact reporter Brian Haynes at bhaynes@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0281.