We’ve had a lot of people receive an I-693 courtesy notice for their adjustment of status application.  The I-693 is the medical exam form. It’s part of the application for adjustment of status to receive a green card. You have to go to a civil surgeon to a doctor and have a medical examination completed.

You will receive that medical exam in a sealed envelope that will be sent with your adjustment of status application. If you didn’t send the medical exam with your application, it’s usually because of timing. Sometimes, with the medical exam, it’s hard to get it scheduled and you want to be able to get your application sent out.

It’s completely fine if you send your application without the medical exam. You would just be required to provide it later. If you happen to send in your green card application without the medical exam, USCIS will send you a notice, an I-693 courtesy notice, usually on a colored sheet of paper and it’ll say deficiency or courtesy notice for the I-693.

If you receive this notice, don’t panic. It’s just a notice from USCIS stating that they’ve received your green card application. A reminder that you didn’t send your medical exam. One of two things will happen: you’ll either receive a request from immigration to mail it in or you will just take it with you when you have your green card interview. The latter is the more common scenario.

We send applications for our clients without the medical exam because getting the application sent out on time is extremely important. If we’re in a time crunch and a medical exam can’t be scheduled or we won’t be able to obtain it in time, we will just go ahead and send the application knowing that we’ll get the medical exam and take it to the interview.

The medical exam cannot be more than 60 days old at the time that you submit your application to immigration. Sometimes people get excited if they’re doing their own application and they get their medical exam early. If that medical exam is more than 60 days old when you submit your application to immigration, you’ll have to get a new one.

That’s one reason that individuals might opt to get their application sent and then get the medical exam later on. Once you have the medical exam though and it has been submitted to immigration, the medical exam is valid for two years from the date that it was signed by the civil surgeon.