Is There Any Legal Recourse If a Healthcare Provider Alters My Medical Records?

In many of the medical malpractice cases that I prosecute, I look for evidence that a medical record has been edited, changed, altered, or written after the circumstances that brought the lawsuit into focus. When this happens, I ask for an audit trail, and in these days with electronic medical records, we have the ability to see who accessed your records, what they did, when they did it, and whether they made changes or made entries after you were already injured. Those kinds of things are good evidence in a medical malpractice case of guilt that the medical providers needed to cover their tracks or make sure that they wrote a note explaining the circumstances and not of real time actually what happened. So, when I see that there have been alterations to or late entries in a medical record, I know that the circumstances of that need to be dug into to determine if there is further evidence that we don’t know about that’s been covered up.