Reply: Optical Express Charging £50 for patient's records

I requested my records from OE and got the standard response stating I would have to pay £50 for them. I rang to pay by card and was told I would receive the receipt along with my records within 21 days. When my records and receipt arrived they had only charged me £10.
Happy days

If your treatment took place in any of the Irish stores, then OE are subject to Irish Data Protection laws - the max fee is €6.35
_________________________
From: "DPC Info" < info@dataprotection.ie>
Date: Nov 19, 2013 9:08 AM
Subject: ODPC response - 19/11/13

The Freedom of Information legislation is separate from the Data Protection Acts and as far as we are aware only applies to certain designated public bodies. In relation to your email once Optical Express has a Dublin based branch and process's personal data from there it will be subject to the
provisions of the Irish Data Protection Acts including the right of access provision.
To exercise this right you should make a written request under section 4 of the Data Protection Acts 1988 & 2003 to the branch that treated you, requesting a copy of any personal data they hold about held on computer or manual file. If there is specific information that you are seeking like in this instance emails relating to your treatment, you should include details of this in the request . You should keep a copy of your instruction and include an access fee of €6.35. Optical Express will have 40 days from the date it receives your request to provide you with a copy of your personal data. Further information on the right of access can be found at the following link:
www.dataprotection.ie/ViewDoc.asp?fn=/do.../2d.htm&CatID=17&m=r

Information Officer
Office of the Data Protection Commissioner
Canal House
Station Road
Portarlington
Co. Laois

www.opticalexpress.co.uk/docs/journal_of_refractive_surgery.pdf
Page S635

"To facilitate efficient patient care across multiple locations, Optical Express uses an electronic medical records system to capture and store all relevant clinical information. Because information can be extracted from this database, the Optical Express biostatistics department has the data resources necessary to perform a range of large-scale patient outcomes analyses."

If this is true then OE must be able to email records to patient for maximum £10 charge as quoted by Mr X below!

To quote Craig (True Stories):
When you pay for your records please pay with a Credit card, because if your records do not arrive within the 21 days you can report this to your credit card company for a ‘charge back’ for none receipt of goods (fraud). This puts a black mark on their mrechant account and the more complaints made to credit card companies will have a massive effect on Optical Express being able to accept any card payments for transactions in the future.

Luckily I got my records before they started charging silly fees to put people off.

But I also at some point requested a copy of the customer satisfaction surveys that they ask you to do on a computer after most appointments, I got these and they are most interesting indeed, on the majority of the things where I gave a negative comment there are duplicates of those questions, the first is the proper one with my comments and the duplicate directly below it has a positive comment, I believe that it's been tampered with (so does my legal team) and the person that did it made the huge error of not taking out my original comments!

"Under the Data Protection Act 1998 (Fees and Miscellaneous Provisions) Regulations 2001 the maximum fee that can be charged for providing copies of health records is £10 for computer records and £50 for copies of manual records or a mixture of manual and computer records. Charges are for copying and posting the records only and should not result in a profit for the record holder. Some types of records, such as x-rays, may be expensive to copy."

In short if you require ONLY electronic records then the maximum is £10 that can be applied.

It really depends on what you require and how they have the information stored.

The charges should be proportional though, it would be in extremely poor taste to charge someone £50 for two sheets of paper as a document for example.

If they will not move on their charges I would personally ask for a breakdown of the costs incurred to supply the information you require. They may refuse of course, but if their charges don't equate to profit making they shouldn't.

You cannot be charged more than £10 for electronic records. If O.E. still ask for £50 you can complain here!

Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Telephone 08456 30 60 60 or 01625 54 5745
www.dataprotection.gov.uk