Building a chronology by hand vs with software: time and cost
Answer in brief: published estimates put a manual chronology at roughly 15 to 60 pages an hour, so a 1,000-page file takes roughly 17 to 67 hours of someone's time. Software cuts the extraction to a processing wait, but your verification time stays. Use the calculator below with your own file size and pace.
Limits: Tool facts come from each vendor's own website, read 2026-11-12, and we have not tested those products. The time figures are published estimates from other sites, cited where used, and the worked example is synthetic.
What the published estimates say
We found no controlled study of how long a medical record chronology takes. What exists are estimates on the websites of companies that sell chronology software or services. We list them because they are the only numbers in circulation, and we treat them as marketing claims.
| Source | Claim | Implied pages an hour | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inquery templates post | 10 to 20 hours for 300 to 500 pages | 15 to 50 | 2026-11-12 |
| Inquery templates post | 30 to 40 hours for 1,000+ pages | 25 to 33 | 2026-11-12 |
| Inquery templates post | About 8 to 12 hours for a 487-page sample | 41 to 61 | 2026-11-12 |
| Inquery templates post | AI chronology plus 1 to 2 hours of review | n/a | 2026-11-12 |
| EvenUp guide | 8 to 20+ hours depending on record volume | Not given | 2026-11-12 |
| Rev blog | A few hours to a full day; several days for complex cases | Not given | 2026-11-12 |
The implied rates are our arithmetic: pages divided by hours, at both ends of each range. They agree on an order of magnitude, tens of pages an hour, and that is all they support. Your pace depends on handwriting, scan quality, how many providers there are, and how much detail the referral questions need.
Why duplicates cost time by hand but not money with software
By hand, you still look at every page, including the duplicates, because you can't know a page is a duplicate until you've compared it. A file with 300 duplicate pages takes nearly as long to work through as one without them. Software that detects exact duplicates skips them, and some per-page tools don't bill them. That is why the calculator uses total pages for the manual estimate and deduplicated pages for the software cost.
Time and cost calculator
Change any input. Defaults: a 1,200-page file, 30 pages an hour by hand (the middle of the published range), 2 hours of verification after software (the top of Inquery's 1 to 2 hour claim), 1 hour of processing (Medrecords AI states about 1 hour per case; other tools vary), and 10 cents a billed page (the Medrecords AI starting rate). Set your hourly value to see the trade-off in dollars.
The calculator assumes the same person builds by hand and verifies the software output. If staff build by hand and you verify, run it twice with each person's hourly value.
What a 1,200-page file costs at published software prices
Prices from each vendor's own pricing page, read 2026-11-12, applied to the default 1,200-page file with no duplicates. Pricing models differ, so the totals are approximate.
| Tool | Published price | 1,200 pages | Source, read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| CaseMark | $25 + $0.01 a page, capped at $100 up to 25,000 pages | $37 | casemark.com/pricing, 2026-11-12 |
| Medrecords AI (ours) | $0.10 a deduplicated page; $0.08 at 100,000 credits, $0.05 at 500,000 | $120, less any duplicates | Our product page, 2026-11-12 |
| InPractice | Page packs: $150 for 1,000 pages ($0.15) down to $0.07 a page at 100,000 | $180 at the 1,000-page rate, bought as packs | inpractice.ai/pricing, 2026-11-12 |
| Legalyze | $299 a case; $199 during a sale ending November 30 | $199 to $299 | legalyze.ai/pricing, 2026-11-12 |
Per-case pricing favors big files and per-page pricing favors small ones. Price also isn't the deciding factor for most physicians: a tool that saves $50 and costs you an extra hour of checking is the expensive one. The tools page covers who each product is built for.
What software does and what stays with you
| Task | By hand | Software | Still yours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reading scans and handwriting | You read every page | OCR; weak on poor handwriting and faint faxes | Pages the software flags as unreadable |
| Exact duplicates | Page-by-page comparison | Detected automatically | Near-duplicates and copy-forward |
| Dating | You find the date of service | Extracted, sometimes from the wrong field | Rows where the fax date or print date was used |
| Rows and citations | You write and cite | Drafted with page links | Opening the cited page for rows you rely on |
| Flags and gaps | You spot them | Some tools flag gaps and missing records | Typing each gap; deciding what it means |
| The opinion | Yours | Not its job | All of it |
How to test a tool on your own file
Run 1 closed file you have already reviewed by hand through the tool. Then check 4 things against your own chronology: did it find every encounter on the rows your opinion rested on, are those rows dated by date of service, does each citation open the right page, and did it catch the duplicates and the records referenced but missing. If it misses a row you relied on, find out why before you use it on a live file.
Then keep checking on live files, at least on the rows your opinion rests on. The routine is step 8 on the step-by-step page.