Almost nobody loses their medical records through carelessness. They lose them because a building closed, or burned, or because they moved — and by the time it matters, there is no one left to ask.
In January 2025, the Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed an AltaMed clinic in Pasadena, a UCLA Health clinic in the Palisades, and John's Physician Partners, a primary care and pediatric practice. AltaMed closed five more sites to evacuation, and more than 190 of its providers and staff were themselves evacuated or lost their homes.
I practice in Southern California. Those weeks were not abstract here, and I want to be careful about how I use them — people died, and a great many lost everything. But if you were a patient of one of those practices, something quieter also happened to you, and almost nobody was in a position to think about it at the time.
Hurricane Katrina is the reference point. An estimated 400,000 paper medical records were destroyed. More than 160 dental practices lost every physical patient record they held. Hospitals could not get records out of the region, so hundreds of thousands of evacuees arrived in other states with no documentation of their conditions or their medications — and their new physicians treated them without one.
The response was improvised and remarkable. Harris County built a 130,000-square-foot clinic inside the Astrodome with eighty computers, creating new electronic records for people who had none. A coalition stood up KatrinaHealth.org in a matter of hours to share medication histories.
And the lesson got learned. In 2005, very few hospitals in the region used electronic records. Today essentially all of them do, backed up remotely. The specific disaster of 2005 — charts turning to pulp in a flooded basement — mostly cannot happen now.
Electronic records solved destruction. They did not solve access.
This is the part I'd want you to take from this piece, because it's the difference between a 2005 problem and a 2026 one.
When a practice closes — fire, retirement, sale, the death of a solo physician — the records usually still exist. They're in a system, backed up, intact. What stops existing is the organization that would have given them to you. The phone number goes dead. The portal login stops working. The staff who knew where things were have gone to other jobs.
The records are fine. There is simply nobody left to ask.
An orphaned record is exactly as useful to you as one that burned, and it's harder to recognize as a loss, because nothing visibly happened.
Here is the full set of ways this happens, none of which involve you doing anything wrong:
Look at that list and notice what it has in common: every item is ordinary. Not one of them is a failure of care, or of attention, or of yours. They're just things that happen to people over a life.
Usually they do survive, which is the hopeful part. When a practice closes, records are typically transferred to another facility or to a designated custodian, and many states require notice of where they went.
Finding them is the work. In practice it means calling the successor practice if there is one, asking physicians who had privileges at the hospital where the charts went, contacting the state health department or medical board, and sometimes the state attorney general's office, which may hold closure notices. It's doable. It takes weeks, it takes persistence, and it's markedly harder when the practice was small or rural and never used an electronic system at all.
It is also, invariably, work you end up doing at the worst possible time — when a new doctor has just asked for something you don't have.
Tell UploMD where you've been seen and we'll request your records from each facility — including your actual MRI, CT and X-ray images, viewable on your phone and shareable with any doctor you choose. It's yours, and it doesn't stop working when a practice does.
Get started free Read the closed-practice guideThis article is general information, not medical or legal advice. Records-access rights, retention periods and closure-notification rules vary by state and by facility — check with the specific provider or your state medical board for their process.
