Lawsuit accuses Conway Medical Center employees of sharing patient’s ‘extraordinarily personal’ health information
HORRY COUNTY, S.C. (WBTW) — A former Conway Medical Center nurse is accusing the hospital and two of its employees of sharing her “extraordinarily personal” health information with people who were not authorized to see it, according to a lawsuit obtained by News13.
The lawsuit was filed Friday in Horry County Common Pleas Court by a woman only identified as Jane Doe. It names Conway Medical Center, its director of health information management and the woman’s former nursing supervisor.
The woman began working at CMC as a registered nurse in April 2016, according to the lawsuit. On Nov. 17, 2017, she went to the hospital’s emergency department after experiencing “severe” skin-related issues.
Three days later, she was admitted for observation related to additional skin issues and an altered mental state that medical professionals believed to be related to her starting a medication she was prescribed to treat her skin infection, the suit said. She was taken off the prescription and her altered mental state was quickly resolved.
However, during the woman’s hospital stay, CMC physicians and staff negatively characterized her reaction as a potential psychiatric episode, using “inflammatory descriptions” of her throughout volumes of notations in her medical chart, the lawsuit alleges, calling the characterization of the mental condition “so negative and embarrassing” and “extraordinarily personal and embarrassing.”
The woman was discharged from the hospital on Nov. 22, 2017, according to the lawsuit. A few weeks later on Dec. 15, she was asked to sign a medical records release form sent by an attorney representing the father of her child in a custody dispute in Horry County. The court had previously temporarily granted her custody of her son in June 2017.
Months later, in March 2018, the court had reversed its previous decision and awarded primary custody to the child’s father, according to the lawsuit, basing its decision in part on information contained in medical records that she was asked to sign in December 2017.
After the decision, the woman met with CMC’s director of health information management and requested an audit trail of her electronic health record because the timing of the medical records request was very proximate to her hospital visits, the lawsuit said. She met with the director on March 22.
The director sent the woman her audit trail, which showed who had accessed her medical records from Oct. 10, 2017 up to March 22, 2018, according to the lawsuit. The director represented that nothing was out of the ordinary regarding unauthorized access and that the report came back “clean.”
The woman relied upon the “clean” report, which, unbeknownst to her at the time, had allegedly been fraudulently altered by the director to conceal numerous instances of unauthorized access by CMC employees, the lawsuit said. She was not aware it had been altered until April 2023. She resigned from her job in May 2018.
The South Carolina Court of Appeals in 2023 upheld the Family Court’s decision to award primary custody to the father of the woman’s child, according to the lawsuit. Shortly after the decision, she requested an up-to-date audit trail of her CMC records, but oddly it only included information from Dec. 12, 2017 until March 29, 2023.
The director told the woman that the audit trail information prior to Dec. 12 was no longer available, though the lawsuit alleges when further pressed about it, the director claimed they were only allowed to provide her with the information from Dec. 12 to the present and said he would need to speak to CMC’s attorney about releasing records prior to that date.
The woman became “highly suspicious” of the director’s “inconsistent and contradictory statements,” and contacted CMC’s chief financial officer, who was believed to be the director’s supervisor, according to the lawsuit. She was provided with the audit trail report the next day, which showed who accessed her CMC medical records prior to Dec. 12, 2017.
After reviewing the report, the woman noticed entries indicating that her nursing supervisor had accessed her records on Dec. 8, 2017, even though she was in no way involved in her treatment or care and was not authorized to see it, the lawsuit alleges. That information was not included in the original audit report the director sent to the woman.
When she first requested her audit trail in March 2018, the director realized that the woman’s nursing supervisor had improperly accessed her records and allegedly removed the entries that showed the supervisor’s involvement, according to the lawsuit. She was unaware of this until April 2023 after requesting another audit report from the director’s supervisor.
“Upon information and belief, the director was either directed to remove the entries from the 2018 audit report Doe received or did so with the knowledge of CMC’s corporate leadership,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit accuses CMC, the director and nursing supervisor of negligence, gross negligence and negligent/reckless inflection of emotional distress. It also accuses CMC and the nursing supervisor of invasion of privacy.
The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount in damages and requests a jury trial.
News13 reached out to CMC Tuesday morning, which said it had no comment.
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Caleb is a digital producer at News13. Caleb joined the team in January 2023 after graduating from Liberty University. He is from Northern Virginia. Follow Caleb on X, formerly Twitter, and read more of his work here.
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