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How long does medical record review take?

The honest answer is five business days for most cases, and the reasons it is not faster are the reasons the work is worth ordering.

Written by the NaviCase clinical team  ·  Updated September 2, 2026  ·  4 min read

Five weekday cells on a dark calendar ticking to emerald, a records stack beside them

A full clinician review of a medical record, meaning every accessible page read in date order and returned as a cited chronology, takes five business days at NaviCase from the moment payment is received. That is the standard for cases of ordinary size, and it holds for most cases up to a few thousand pages. Larger productions, records that need extensive optical character recognition before they can be read, and cases arriving during a surge can take longer, and the completion date is confirmed before you commit rather than discovered afterward.

What takes the time

The reading is the work, and reading takes a minimum amount of time. A clinician reading carefully, with a running timeline and page citations, gets through somewhere in the range of a thousand to fifteen hundred pages in a working day depending on how much of the production is templated, duplicated, or handwritten. A 2,000-page case is two days of reading before quality review, formatting, and delivery. Services that promise a 48-hour turnaround on a case of that size are either sampling the record, splitting it among several readers with no one reading the whole record, or handing the reading to software and calling the output a review. Each of those is a way to be fast, and each is a way to miss the page that matters.

What happens before the clock starts

At NaviCase the order is the upload: records go into the service folder in your secure portal, the pages are counted, and the exact total arrives by email the same business day with a link to pay by card or ACH. Payment starts the five days. Two things delay the start more than anything else. The first is incomplete productions, where records arrive in pieces over a week and the count cannot be finalized. The second is records that are not readable: scanned images without a text layer, rotated pages, files that will not open. Sending the production complete and readable is the biggest thing a client can do to shorten the total time.

What rush changes

Rush service moves your case to the front of the reading queue; it does not make the reading faster. A two to four business day rush adds 25 percent of the case total, and next business day service adds 50 percent. Rush is confirmed before payment, subject to capacity and to the record being complete and readable, and once confirmed the completion date is written into the engagement. For a deposition or an examination with a fixed date, that confirmation is the point: the date is a commitment, not a target.

Sizing the request to the deadline

If the deadline is real and the record is large, there are two ways to make it. One is rush service on the whole record. The other is to split the order: the records that establish the frame, meaning the emergency department visit, the imaging, the operative reports, and the first and most recent visits with each provider, on rush, and the remainder on standard turnaround. The first delivery covers the deposition or the examination; the second completes the file. Ask when you order, because the split is easy to set up before the count is finalized and awkward after.

What arrives at the end

The chronology as PDF and Word, in the Report Downloads folder of your portal, with an email notice. Word matters for turnaround in the other direction: a timeline that can be cut into a deposition outline or an exhibit without retyping saves the day the firm would otherwise spend rebuilding it.

Questions people ask

How long does a medical chronology take to prepare?

At NaviCase, five business days from payment for cases of ordinary size, with every page read by an orthopedic or spine clinician. Very large productions and unreadable scans can take longer, and the completion date is confirmed before you commit.

Can medical record review be done in 24 hours?

For a small record, yes. NaviCase next business day rush adds 50 percent of the case total and is confirmed before payment, subject to capacity and a complete, readable production. For a large record, a split order with the framing records on rush is usually the better route.

What delays a record review most often?

Productions that arrive incomplete or in pieces, and scanned records with no text layer. Sending the complete production in readable form is the single largest thing a client can do to shorten the total time.

When does the turnaround clock start?

At NaviCase, when payment is received. The total is emailed the same business day the records are uploaded, and the five business days run from payment.

Keep reading

A completion date, not an estimate.

Standard five business days. Rush to next business day, confirmed before you pay.

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