| The skinny Epic's high-profile lawsuit over the alleged misuse of patient data just scored its first major concession. Last Friday, GuardDog Telehealth — one of the defendants accused of exploiting interoperability networks to obtain people's health information — admitted in a legal filing that it falsely represented itself as providing treatment in order to access medical records. The case at hand Epic filed its complaint on January 13, alleging that Health Gorilla allowed other companies to improperly access and monetize nearly 300,000 patient records — a claim Health Gorilla denies. The plaintiffs include Epic, Trinity Health, UMass Memorial Health, Reid Health and OCHIN.
According to the complaint, Health Gorilla and affiliated companies created fake healthcare providers, shell websites, and provider IDs to make data requests appear legitimate, while diverting records for non-treatment purposes such as marketing to lawyers. GuardDog is the first defendant to admit in court that it misrepresented itself as a treating provider in order to gain access to patient records. The agreement "GuardDog admits that, since it began operating as a company in 2024, its goal was to provide chronic care management and remote patient monitoring for patients, but that did not happen. For the duration of its existence, its business instead focused on requesting, reviewing, and summarizing medical records, and providing those medical records to law firms," the company said in a court filing.
As part of its agreement with Epic and the other plaintiffs, the company agreed to stop accessing records through major interoperability frameworks, as well as to delete any patient data it gathered through those systems. Health Gorilla's response Health Gorilla maintains that GuardDog's consent judgement changes nothing for the company. "If you read carefully, GuardDog does not state it ever informed Health Gorilla of any non-treatment use of patient information, and we are prepared to demonstrate it did not. In addition, when Health Gorilla sought to investigate GuardDog along with the interoperability networks and several major health providers, GuardDog failed to respond and refused to cooperate," the company said in a statement sent to MedCity News. — By Katie Adams |
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