How to download medical records from MyChart

If you want the summary from one appointment, you do not need a records request. Open MyChart, go to "Visits" or "Appointments," find the visit, and open it. There is a "View After Visit Summary" or "Visit Summary" link, and next to it a download or print icon.

That gives you a PDF of the after-visit summary: the diagnoses discussed, the medications as of that day, the instructions, and the follow-up plan. It is the document the front desk used to hand you on paper.

For a set of visits rather than one, look for the Document Center in the menu, then "Visit Records." Most versions let you choose a single visit, a date range, or all visits, and produce one combined PDF. A date range covering the last year is a good default when a new doctor asks you to "bring your records."

This is also where you find any records the hospital has already prepared for you. If you filed a formal request and asked for electronic delivery, the finished file often lands here, under a heading like "Requested Records," rather than arriving by email.

The Sharing Hub is the consolidated sharing menu in current versions of MyChart. Open the menu and look for "Sharing Hub." On systems that have not renamed it yet, the same options live under "Share My Record" or in the Document Center.

Inside it, choose the option along the lines of "Download or send your record." You will be asked what to include and, usually, over what date range. Then you pick a destination: download it to this device, or send it directly to another healthcare organization.

The "send to another provider" path is underused and often better than downloading. It transmits the record through the standard clinical exchange network to the receiving office, which means it arrives in a form their system can file rather than as an email attachment somebody has to scan. If your next specialist is at a different health system, try this first.

There is a third option in the same hub worth knowing about, usually called "Share Everywhere." It generates a temporary code that you give to any clinician with an internet connection. They type it into a website with your date of birth and get read-only access to your record for a limited window. It is designed for exactly the case where you are seeing someone outside your health system and nobody has time to send files back and forth.

None of these three cost anything, and none of them require a form.

Somewhere in the download options you will see a choice that is not obviously a choice: a human-readable document, or a structured file with an extension like .xml or a name like "C-CDA" or "continuity of care document."

The PDF is for people. You can read it, print it, email it, and hand it across a desk. It is the right answer when a human being is going to look at it.

The structured file is for software. It carries the same information as coded data: each lab result as a value with units and a reference range, each medication with a dose and a code, each problem with a diagnosis code. A receiving system can import it into its own record instead of scanning it as an image. It looks like gibberish if you open it, and that is not a sign anything went wrong.

Which one to use depends on the destination. Sending to a doctor's office through the portal: let the portal send the structured version, that is what it is for. Handing a folder to a specialist at your appointment: PDF. Loading it into an app that reads health data: structured. Emailing it to a family member: PDF, every time.

A related option some health systems expose is connecting an app directly to the portal, so a third-party application pulls data through a standard interface rather than you downloading files. This is the mechanism Apple Health Records and similar apps use, and the Apple Health export guide covers what that path gives you and what it leaves out.

If you are not sure, take both. They are free and they take the same minute.

MyChart shows a curated view built for patients. It is a substantial view, much larger than it was five years ago, but it is not everything the hospital holds about you.

Common gaps: clinical notes from before the health system adopted its current record system, records scanned in from outside providers, some emergency department and operative documentation, itemized billing records, and the raw imaging pictures. Older paper charts that were never scanned live in storage and appear nowhere online.

To get all of it, you file a records request with the health information management department, which some hospitals still call medical records. Nearly every hospital publishes the form on its website under a heading like "Request Your Medical Records." You can also usually find a link inside MyChart itself.

The form asks for the patient's name and date of birth, the date range you want, what you want included, where to send it, and a signature. That "what you want included" field is where you get specific. If you want everything, write "complete medical record including physician and nursing notes, laboratory and pathology results, radiology reports, operative reports, emergency department records, medication administration records, and consultation notes." Vague requests produce vague results.

Ask for electronic delivery. It is faster, it is usually free or nearly so, and it often lands right back in MyChart under Requested Records. Ask for a disc or paper only if the person receiving it specifically needs that.

If you are helping someone else, you need their signed authorization, or proxy authority the hospital already recognizes. Our guide to sharing MyChart access with family covers how to get that in place before you need it, and a ready-made medical records request tool will generate the letter with the right wording.

A radiology report is text. It is what the radiologist wrote after looking at the scan, and it is what shows up in the portal. The scan itself, the several hundred image slices from a CT or MRI, is a different kind of file and normally lives in a different system.

When a second-opinion specialist says they want to "see the images," they mean the actual pictures, not the report. Getting those means contacting the imaging or radiology department, not the medical records office. Ask for the study on disc in DICOM format, or ask whether they can share it electronically through an image exchange service, which many hospitals now use and which is dramatically faster.

Give them the study date and the body part. "The CT of the abdomen and pelvis from March 4" gets you what you want. "My scans" does not.

Turnaround for a disc is usually a few days and sometimes same-day if you go in person. Some centers charge a small fee for the media; electronic sharing is typically free. If you are gathering material for a second opinion, request the images at the same time as the reports rather than discovering the gap the week of the appointment. Our second opinion guide covers what the reviewing doctor will ask for.

Portal downloads are instant and free. Formal requests have rules behind them, and knowing the rules is what gets a stalled request moving.

Under the federal privacy rule, a provider must act on a request for your records within 30 days, with one 30-day extension allowed if they tell you why. In practice most electronic requests come back in a few days to two weeks.

On cost: a provider may charge a reasonable, cost-based fee for copies. It cannot charge for the labor of searching for or retrieving the record. When records are held electronically and you ask for an electronic copy, that fee is usually nothing or close to it. A per-page charge for a file the hospital emailed you is worth questioning.

The bigger change came from the 21st Century Cures Act and the information blocking rules that followed it. Health systems are required to give patients timely electronic access to their electronic health information, and practices that unreasonably interfere with that access can be reported. This is the legal reason results now appear in the portal the moment they are finalized rather than after a doctor has reviewed them.

If a request is ignored or you are told you cannot have something, escalate in this order. Ask the health information management department directly, by phone, for the status and the name of the person handling it. If that fails, ask for the hospital's privacy officer, which every covered organization is required to have. If that fails, you can file a complaint with the federal Office for Civil Rights, and separately report suspected information blocking to the Office of the National Coordinator's complaint portal. Complaints are free and do not require a lawyer.

One honest caveat. Psychotherapy notes, meaning the therapist's separate process notes rather than the therapy record, are excluded from the right of access. Almost nothing else is.

This is the step almost everybody skips, and it is why so many people download the same records twice.

A portal export arrives as one long PDF, frequently 40 to 300 pages, with visits, labs, and reports concatenated in whatever order the system produced them. It is complete and nearly unreadable. Saved to a Downloads folder with a name like "MyChartExport_20260827.pdf," it will be unfindable in three months.

At minimum, rename the file the moment it lands: date first, then source, then what it is. "2026-08-27 Memorial Hospital portal export.pdf" sorts correctly and searches well. Put it in one folder, not four. Our guide to organizing medical records has the full filing scheme, and it is deliberately minimal.

The deeper problem is that a downloaded record is a snapshot. It is accurate on the day you pulled it and slightly stale a week later. Families who rely on downloads end up re-downloading every couple of months and never quite knowing which copy is current.

That is the case for connecting the portal to something that keeps itself up to date instead. A MyChart connection in a KeptWell circle imports the records and keeps pulling as new ones arrive, so the archive stays current without anyone repeating this process. Records from a second and third health system land in the same circle. And anything that only exists as a downloaded PDF or a scan of paper can be uploaded alongside them, where KeptWell reads it, pulls out the dates, labs, and medication changes, and writes a plain-English summary anyone in the family can follow.

Whatever tool you use, the principle holds. One place, everything in it, current. A folder of exports nobody re-reads is not a record; it is a backup of a record.