Out-of-State Requests for in-State Medical Records

From time to time, an officer from another state wants to get medical records from a North Carolina hospital. For example, a South Carolina officer may want the medical records of a driver who was involved in an accident just south of the border and who was taken to a North Carolina hospital. The officer may suspect that the driver was intoxicated, and may want the driver’s hospital records in order to prove it. If the accident, and the officer, were located in North Carolina, the matter would be routine. The officer could obtain a search warrant or a court order – on the latter possibility, see this blog post – and take it to the hospital. But in the scenario under consideration, the officer’s in South Carolina, and a South Carolina court can’t issue a search warrant that’s valid in North Carolina. That’s true as a matter of South Carolina statutory law, S.C. St. 13-17-140 (a search warrant may be issued only by a judicial official with “jurisdiction over the area where the property sought is located”), and is probably true as a matter of constitutional law also, as discussed to some extent in this blog post. Presumably a South Carolina court order would also be ineffective, for similar reasons. (The law in this area is arcane, so the officer may be able to convince a South Carolina judicial official to issue a warrant or an order, and may then be able to convince a North Carolina hospital to comply [...]