What the market actually publishes
This hub profiles 318 medical record review vendors and platforms against the same eight-field rubric. The median vendor publishes five of the eight. The gaps are not spread evenly. Almost every vendor will tell you what they are good at. Almost none will tell you what a file costs.
| What you want to know | Do not publish it | Count |
|---|---|---|
| What the deliverable looks like, and whether citations survive export | 92% | 294 of 318 |
| What a real 1,000-page file costs, all in | 83% | 265 of 318 |
| Turnaround on a 1,000-page file | 76% | 242 of 318 |
| How they charge: per page, per file, per hour or per seat | 58% | 183 of 318 |
| Which parts are done by software and which by people | 10% | 32 of 318 |
| Who checks the output, and what they are qualified to catch | 9% | 30 of 318 |
| Which case types and file sizes it is built for | 2% | 7 of 318 |
Read that middle column as a shopping list. The 4 facts at the top are the ones that decide whether a vendor is affordable and usable, and they are exactly the 4 the market keeps off its websites. The three at the bottom are the ones vendors volunteer, because they are the easy ones to answer well.
None of this makes a vendor evasive. Most of this industry quotes on request, and that is a legitimate way to sell a service whose cost genuinely depends on the file. It does mean the burden is on you to ask, and to get the answer in writing before a file changes hands.
Money: the unit, then the invoice
How do you charge — per page, per file, per hour, or per seat?
Get the unit before you scope a pilot. A per-hour or per-seat quote and a per-page quote behave very differently once a file runs past 1,000 pages.
What does a real 1,000-page file cost, all in?
Ask for a worked example rather than a rate card. Duplicate pages, rush fees and monthly minimums are where the quoted rate and the final invoice separate.
These two questions are separate on purpose. A vendor can answer the first honestly and still surprise you on the second, because the unit price is rarely the whole bill. Ask both, and ask for the worked example on a file that looks like yours.
Time, and what actually lands in your inbox
What is the turnaround on a 1,000-page file, and is that a median or a best case?
Ask what the clock starts from — receipt, or the point the file clears intake — and what the same number looks like in your busiest week.
What formats does the deliverable come in, and do the citations survive export?
Ask to see an exported file rather than a screen share. A citation that works inside the vendor’s viewer and dies in Word is not a citation you can file.
The export question is the single most withheld fact in the dataset, and it is the one that bites latest. A summary you cannot get out of the vendor’s viewer, in a format your team already works in, is a summary you will retype.
Who does the work, and who checks it
Which parts of this are done by software, and which by people?
Ask for the split step by step. "AI-assisted" and "human-reviewed" each cover a very wide range of how much review actually happens.
Who checks the output before it reaches me, and what are their credentials?
Ask what the reviewer is qualified to catch, and what share of files they actually see rather than sample.
Most vendors answer both of these readily, which is why they sit at the bottom of the table. That makes a vendor who will not answer them worth a second look.
Where your records live
These two apply to every vendor, whatever they sell and however the rest of the rubric scores.
Where do the records live, and who signs the BAA?
Protected health information is going to leave your office. Ask which entity holds it, in which country, and who is on the hook if it leaks.
Is my data used to train a model?
Ask for the answer in the contract rather than the sales call, and check whether it also binds their subprocessors.
The subprocessor half of the second question is the one that gets skipped. A vendor can hold a policy against training on your data and still route it through a provider that holds no such policy.
Fit, and how to use the answers
Which case types and file sizes is this built for?
Ask for the volume band and case mix their current customers run, not the list of case types they are willing to accept.
Take the nine answers into the same table you just read. If a vendor answers all nine on a call and none of them in writing, that is a data point too. If they publish more than the median 5 of eight before you ever speak to them, that is a different kind of data point.
Every vendor profile in this hub lists which of the eight fields that vendor publishes, with the source link for each. Start from the software and platforms index or the service providers index, and bring this list to the call.
