Preparing Your Medical Records for a Chinese Hospital

1. The one-page summary earns its place

Write it as if for a colleague who has four minutes. Diagnosis and date, stage or grade, what treatment has been given and when, what failed and why, current medication, allergies, and the decision you are facing. One page, no narrative. Every hospital we work with reads this first, and a clear summary is often the difference between an answer in a week and a request for more information.

2. Imaging: files, not photographs

Ask the radiology department for the study on a disk or via their patient portal, in DICOM format. A CT of the chest can run to several hundred megabytes; that is normal. Send the radiology report alongside it — the images show the disease, the report tells the reviewer what the local radiologist already concluded.

If the hospital will only issue a PDF, ask whether the original study is still archived and can be exported. Most can. If not, the reviewing hospital may accept a link to a cloud viewer, but expect a slower answer.

3. Pathology: the part everybody forgets

If cancer is on the table, the pathology report is not enough on its own. Chinese cancer centres routinely re-read slides, and for that they need the actual glass slides or the paraffin block, sent by courier. Ask your lab now whether the block is still stored and whether it can be released — this single question can save two weeks later.

4. Bloods, with units

Chinese laboratories report in different units from many Western labs. Tumour markers, creatinine, thyroid function and coagulation panels are all common sources of confusion. Send the original report, which carries units and reference ranges, rather than a typed summary.

5. Translation: what must be human-checked

Machine translation is acceptable for correspondence and appointment logistics. It is not acceptable for pathology, imaging reports, operative notes or medication lists, where a mistranslated term or a dropped negative changes the clinical picture. We use professional medical translation for those documents and keep the original alongside the translation, so the reviewer can always check the source.

6. Security and consent

Medical records are sensitive personal data. Send them through a channel you are comfortable with, keep a list of who has a copy, and check what the coordinator's privacy policy says about retention and deletion. We ask every patient to sign a records-authorisation form that names the hospitals we may share the file with — and only those.

7. The mistakes that cost the most time

• Sending everything. A 300-page unsorted export gets put aside. Send the summary, the key reports and the images.
• Sending images without the report, or the report without the images.
• Photographing a screen — moiré patterns make fine detail unusable.
• Leaving out previous treatments. Reviewers need to know what has already been tried and how the disease responded.
• No question. A file with no specific question gets a general answer.

8. What happens after you send it

We check completeness before anything goes to a hospital, translate what needs translating, and only then put the file in front of a department. If something is missing, you hear it from us within a day or two rather than waiting a fortnight for a hospital to ask. The main guide explains what happens once the hospital answers.