Sep 10 2025
Josh Goodbaum: Hi, Amanda.
Amanda DeMatteis: Hi, Josh. What are we going to talk about today?
Goodbaum: I want to talk about reasonable accommodations and access to medical records. So, you have an employee client. They have a disability. They want to request a reasonable accommodation. They go to their employer and say, “Hey, here’s the reasonable accommodation I would like.” The employer says, “Okay, please complete this form.” The form asks what you want as a reasonable accommodation, how long you want it for, and also says, “Please authorize us to get all of your medical records from your various physicians and other medical providers.” The employee client comes back to you and says, “Wait a minute, do I have to give my employer access to all of my medical records in order to get a reasonable accommodation for my disability? Are they allowed to do that?”
DeMatteis: The answer is no, they’re not allowed to do that. In fact, there are certain circumstances where an employer does not need any medical records at all when they are analyzing a request for a reasonable accommodation. That might be a circumstance where an individual is in a wheelchair. Maybe they need access to an elevator or a ramp. That employer likely does not need medical documentation to support the fact that this individual, who uses a wheelchair, needs access in a way other than, say, stairs.
However, if you are requesting, maybe, an ergonomic chair or something else to make your workspace more comfortable, given a disability that you have, an employer certainly can ask that you provide medical documentation to substantiate that request. But the medical documentation requested must be related to the accommodation sought.
So, if your employer is saying, “We need complete access to all of your medical records,” and you need an ergonomic chair, they don’t need medical records from an OB-GYN or a cardiologist or a podiatrist, for that matter. Those records would be wholly irrelevant to the request that is being made.
So, whatever the employer is looking for needs to be quite tailored. If you push back on this in the workplace, and your employer is saying, “No, we need a complete release of all of your medical records in order to even analyze this request for a reasonable accommodation,” I would pump the brakes there and speak to an employment lawyer because that goes outside the bounds of what we see as reasonable when an individual is requesting a reasonable accommodation under either the Americans with Disabilities Act, which of course is our federal law that protects disabled individuals or employees at work, or the Connecticut Fair Employment Practices Act, which is our state counterpart.
Goodbaum: Great advice, Amanda. Thank you. Thank you all for watching. We’ll see you next time.
Posted by Garrison, Levin-Epstein, Fitzgerald & Pirrotti, P.C. in Commentary
Tagged Amanda DeMatteis, Disability Discrimination, Joshua Goodbaum, Reasonable Accommodation
