How to Get Your Medical Records From a Clinic Abroad

Each year, millions of US residents travel to another country for medical care, according to the CDC's Yellow Book (2026 edition). Most of them fly home with a suitcase, a healing incision, and a folder that is thinner than it should be. The American Medical Association names the problem directly in its Code of Medical Ethics opinion on medical tourism (Opinion 1.2.13): medical tourism confounds core ethical expectations about patients' rights, including continuity of care and access to their medical records. Your surgery can go beautifully and you can still end up in a US exam room a year later, across from a doctor who has no idea what was implanted, which antibiotic you were given, or how the tissue was closed.

This is a paperwork problem, which makes it a solvable one. It is only solvable at the right moment, though, and that moment is before you leave the building.

What documents should you ask for before you leave the clinic?

Ask for seven things: the operative report, the anesthesia record, the discharge summary, pathology and laboratory results, implant or device details with serial numbers, your medication list, and imaging files. Request them in English, in print and digital form, before you are discharged. The CDC's guidance is to obtain a complete set of records before you return home.

Each of these does a different job once you are back in the US, and the ones people forget are usually the ones that matter most later.

1. The operative report. An operative report is the surgeon's own narrative of what happened in the room: the approach used, what was found, how tissue was handled, what was removed or left behind, and how everything was closed. A discharge summary tells your US doctor that you had surgery. The operative report tells them what surgery you actually had.
2. The anesthesia record. This documents what you were given, in what doses, and how you responded. If you ever need another operation, an anesthesiologist will want it.
3. The discharge summary. The clinical overview of your stay, including complications and post-op instructions.
4. Pathology and laboratory results. Anything sent to a lab produced a report, and that report belongs to you.
5. Implant and device details. Get the manufacturer, model, and serial or lot number for anything left inside your body, whether that is a dental implant, a breast implant, a gastric band, or fixation hardware. Without the serial number, a US surgeon cannot look up the device, check it against a recall, or match a replacement part.
6. Your medication list. Names, doses, and duration for everything administered and everything prescribed, using generic drug names rather than local brand names.
7. Imaging files, not just imaging reports. Ask for the raw scans in DICOM format, on a USB drive or via a download link. DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the international standard for storing and exchanging medical images, developed by the American College of Radiology and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association and first published in 1985. Nearly every radiology department in the world can open a DICOM file. Almost none of them can do anything useful with a photograph of a printed scan.

Why is a discharge summary not enough on its own?

A discharge summary is a summary. It tells a US clinician that you had a procedure and roughly how it went, but it rarely contains the technical detail needed to treat a complication, revise a result, or plan a second operation. The American College of Surgeons encourages patients receiving treatment abroad to obtain a complete set of medical records before returning home, so the details of their care are immediately available to their physicians and surgeons in the US.

The ACS also makes a point that is easy to skip past in the excitement of booking a trip: follow-up care at home should be organized before you travel, not after you land. Complications that surface during recovery are handled far better when your regular physician already has every record from the care delivered abroad. The AMA frames the same issue from the doctor's side, noting that physicians asked to follow up on care from medical travel are put in a difficult position when they lack the information needed to guide that follow-up. If you want the full picture of how those situations unfold, we covered it in what happens if something goes wrong after surgery abroad.

How long does a clinic abroad have to keep your records?

Long enough that a late request is usually still possible, but not indefinitely. Mexico and Thailand each require a minimum of five years. South Korea requires ten years for medical records and five for imaging data. Those are legal floors rather than promises, and a clinic that closes or changes ownership can make even a valid request difficult to fulfill.

The practical takeaway is that imaging tends to be the first thing to disappear. In South Korea the imaging retention floor is half the record retention floor, and imaging files are large, which gives clinics everywhere an incentive to purge them early. If there is one item to collect on the day you are discharged rather than request later, it is your scans.

What is your legal right to request records after you get home?

It depends entirely on where you were treated, because HIPAA does not follow you across a border. HIPAA governs US covered entities and their business associates. A hospital in Istanbul or Bangkok is neither, so your access rights come from that country's own privacy and health law instead.

That is less alarming than it sounds. Several major medical travel destinations have access rights that are as strong as HIPAA, and in one respect stronger.

The EU rule is worth understanding in detail if you were treated anywhere in the bloc. In FT v DW (Case C-307/22), decided on 26 October 2023, the Court of Justice of the European Union held that GDPR requires a controller to provide a patient with a first copy of their medical record free of charge, and struck down a German national provision that had let doctors bill patients for it. If a European clinic tells you that copies of your file carry a fee, that ruling is the one to cite.

Turkish clinics operate under KVKK, Law No. 6698, which obliges a data controller to conclude a data subject's request within thirty days. Istanbul and Ankara are two of the busiest destinations in medical travel, and the international patient departments at the larger hospitals handle these requests routinely.

When should you make each request?

The single most useful habit is asking on arrival rather than at checkout. Tell the international patient coordinator on day one that you will need a complete records package in English before you leave, and give them the list. Coordinators at high-volume hospitals prepare these constantly, but a translated operative report takes a day or two to produce, and a request made an hour before your airport transfer will not be finished in time.

What if the clinic stops responding?

Work through these in order, and keep everything in writing.

1. Email the international patient department, not your surgeon. Surgeons operate. Coordinators handle records, and they have the login for the system your file lives in.
2. Cite the specific law. A request that says "under GDPR Article 15, I am requesting a copy of my personal data" is handled differently from one that says "can I get my paperwork." For Türkiye, name KVKK Law No. 6698 and the thirty-day deadline.
3. Give them a clean way to send it. Offer a secure upload link or ask for encrypted media by courier, and provide your passport copy and treatment dates up front so identity verification does not stall the request.
4. Escalate to the hospital's patient rights office. Large accredited hospitals have one, and it typically outranks the department that is ignoring you. This is one of the quieter reasons JCI accreditation is worth screening for before you book.
5. Contact the national data protection authority. Every GDPR country has one, Türkiye has the KVKK authority, and complaints from patients abroad are within their remit.

If you booked through a coordinator or platform rather than contacting the hospital directly, start there instead. Chasing records across a language barrier and eight time zones is exactly the kind of task you should not be doing alone while recovering.

Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash

Do your records need to be translated into English?

Yes, in practice. The CDC's Yellow Book advises that medical travelers may need to have their overseas records translated into English and should give them to any clinician they see afterward for follow-up. Many international hospitals issue English documentation by default, but a record generated for local clinical use, such as a nursing chart or a lab printout, is often produced in the local language only.

Ask the clinic whether it provides certified English versions and whether that carries a fee. If you are arranging translation yourself, use a translator with medical experience rather than a general service or a phone app, because a mistranslated drug name or laterality marker is worse than no translation at all. Keep the original-language documents too. A US specialist may want a colleague to check the source, and insurers processing a claim sometimes ask for both. If you are filing a claim, our guide to medical tourism insurance covers what documentation carriers typically require.

The short version

Your records are the only part of a trip abroad that keeps working for you after you land. They are what turns a procedure performed in another country into care that a US physician can safely continue, and they cost nothing to collect if you ask on day one instead of at the airport.

Build the request into your trip the same way you build in the flights and the recovery days. Our step-by-step guide to planning a first medical tourism trip shows where the records conversation fits in the timeline, and the broader guide to medical tourism for Americans covers the decisions that come before it. If you are still weighing whether to travel at all, is medical tourism safe works through what the evidence actually shows.