M Health Fairview UMMC West Bank Visitor & Records Guide

Riverside Avenue Medical Campus

Why Serious Injury Cases Run Through the West Bank Campus

The West Bank campus of M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Medical Center sits at 2450 Riverside Ave in Minneapolis, in Hennepin County (S2 cell 52b32d3c). Google Maps lists M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital about 300 feet away. In a straight line, the West Bank campus is about 1.9 miles from our Minneapolis office at 10 S 5th St, Suite 800, about 0.6 miles from Washington Ave S and Cedar Ave, about 1.1 miles from U.S. Bank Stadium, and about 1.5 miles from the Hennepin County Government Center. Washington and Cedar is the center of the Cedar-Riverside crash pattern where a left turn crosses the Green Line tracks, which I describe on its own page.

That geography is why so many serious injuries from Minneapolis and the rest of Hennepin County are treated on Riverside Avenue. When a crash puts an adult in the medical center and a child in the children’s hospital next door, the same few hundred feet of campus hold the whole medical story, and every building keeps its own file.

I’m Gabe Andrade. Andrade Law is a personal injury law firm in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and I also meet clients at our Minneapolis office. For families, a trauma admission means two things at once: your person is in the right place, and the paper trail that starts here will matter for a long time.

Finding Your Way

Getting In: Entrances and Parking

I don’t publish entrance maps or parking instructions for the West Bank campus. M Health Fairview sets them, and they change without notice. Check the medical center’s own directions page for the West Bank campus before you drive in, and search Google Maps for the West Bank campus by name, since the medical center’s name alone matches more than one pin.

Once inside, start at the information desk, give the patient’s full legal name, and write down the unit and room as soon as staff can share it. If you arrived behind an ambulance, you won’t know the room yet. Ask, wait, and ask again.

Supporting a Patient

Visiting Basics

Visiting policies depend on the unit and can change, so confirm the current rules before you arrive. Intensive-care units usually run tighter rules than general floors, and the children’s hospital may run its own. Bring photo ID, travel light, and expect to be asked who you are to the patient. One practical check before you leave home: confirm the building with whoever called you, because the medical center also has a separate East Bank campus about 0.4 miles northeast of this one.

Keep a notebook from day one. Write down the care team’s names, the dates of procedures, and what you were told in plain words. If you can’t get information or don’t understand a decision, ask for the patient relations office. For the medical care itself, ask staff about interpreter services; for the legal side, we work in English and Spanish directly.

Our Regions Hospital ER navigation and patient support guide covers the same routine for the east side of the Twin Cities, and our St. John's Hospital visitor and medical records guide does the same for Maplewood. When the patient is a child, our Gillette Children's specialty care visitor guide covers what changes.

The Paper Trail

Medical Records and Your Injury Claim

An injury generates more records than most people expect. The ambulance service writes its own run report, which the hospital does not hold. Inside the hospital the file grows to include the triage note, physician and nursing notes, imaging and the radiologist’s reads, operative reports, medication records, the discharge summary, and an itemized bill. If the patient moves between the medical center and the children’s hospital, or on to another facility, ask which one holds each part of the record. A request to one desk may not cover another.

You have the right to see that file. Under Minn. Stat. §§ 144.292–.293, Minnesota’s patient-access provisions, you can inspect your records and get copies, and a person you authorize in writing can request them for you. The statute puts a 30-day clock on the provider. Ask the release-of-information desk for the complete record, not a summary, and ask for the itemized bill separately.

Timing matters for three reasons. Records get amended and coded for weeks after discharge, so an early copy is rarely the final one. No-fault medical benefits under Minn. Stat. § 65B.44 pay the first bills regardless of fault. And Minn. Stat. § 65B.55 asks for notice to your no-fault insurer within six months of the crash. That deadline is soft, because the insurer has to show it was prejudiced by a late notice, but I don’t let clients test it. With your signed authorization, we request the records ourselves.

The Legal Side

Why This Matters After a Crash

The state’s Crash Facts report for 2023 counts 53 people killed in Hennepin County traffic crashes that year and 6,524 injured. Many of the most serious of those injuries are treated on this campus. Minnesota’s no-fault tort threshold, Minn. Stat. § 65B.51, requires proof like a permanent injury or medical expenses above a set level before an injured person can step outside no-fault and sue the at-fault driver. That proof lives in the records this campus produces. A complete record does not decide a claim by itself, but no claim stands without one.

When the patient is a child, two more rules apply. Any settlement of a minor’s injury claim needs court approval under Minn. Stat. § 540.08, and the limitation period does not run while the child is a minor under Minn. Stat. § 541.15. Neither rule is a reason to wait. Evidence disappears on the same schedule whether the patient is six or sixty.

If you want to understand what the most serious cases have to prove before you talk to an adjuster, start with what catastrophic and life-altering injury claims have to document about future care, then bring your questions to a free consultation. Our Minneapolis office is about 1.9 miles from the West Bank campus, and we meet by phone or video while a family is still at a bedside.

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