In July 2023, two patients at VUMC sued the hospital over what they call the hospital’s failure to protect their personal health information.
The patients filed a class action lawsuit against Vanderbilt in Davidson County Chancery Court for the 20th Judicial District.
The lawsuit came after the Tennessee Attorney General requested information on patients of the Vanderbilt Transgender Health Clinic. The patients claim Vanderbilt failed to follow both federal law and its own privacy policy when it provided health information of more than 100 patients without notification.
“Your health, your sexual health, your sexual partners – all those things are things that can be discussed with doctors, and the fact that this information was given over to a government agency without any notice or attempts to make it anonymous is really desperately concerning to our clients,” said Tricia Herzfeld in a previous interview with News 2.
Herzfeld is with the HSG Law Firm and is one of the lawyers representing the patients.
Now, more than a dozen patients are adding their names to the lawsuit, claiming the hospital released some of the most intimate details of their personal lives, including pictures of body parts, gender identity unknown to others, mental health information, and the identity of intimate partners.
Two different types of class-action lawsuits have been filed; one of them is by patients who claim they were told their records were released to the AG. However, they learned afterward that their records were never released. Now, they claim this caused them “unnecessary emotional distress.”
“Our focus right now is on Vanderbilt’s duty to its patients. It had a duty to let its patients know this was going on, and to protect that information, and they didn’t do it,” said Herzfeld.
