The request came in on a Tuesday: a disability claim for a man in his sixties, and the insurer needed evidence of a back injury first treated in 1986. The treating physician had retired in 2009. The practice had closed. The planner found nothing over any network, which is expected for records that predate electronic anything.
Our voice agent called the number on file, which now belonged to a dental office. The receptionist there, wonderfully, knew the old doctor's daughter. The agent recorded the lead and escalated to me, because 'call a retired doctor's daughter' is not in the script and should not be.
I called. The charts were in her father's basement in boxes, kept because he had been told to keep them and never told he could stop. She found the patient's folder in forty minutes. She did not have a scanner. She had a fax machine, which the dental office let her use.
The fax was 118 pages. Our OCR pipeline handled the typed pages well and the handwritten progress notes poorly, which we flagged with confidence scores rather than guessing. A human reviewer transcribed the nine pages that mattered. The 1986 injury was documented on page 74.
Total elapsed time: two days, most of it waiting for a Thursday when the daughter was free. The claim was approved. The daughter asked whether she could now throw the boxes away. We told her that was between her and the state of Vermont, but that we would keep a copy of the one folder for exactly 30 days, and then delete it, as promised.