In what may be the first case of a health provider breaching confidentiality on MySpace, a Portland, Ore., rape victim has sued an ambulance paramedic who published details of the crime after transporting her to the hospital.
Simon Green was a member of an American Medical Response paramedic team that attended to the victim on Feb. 15. She had been raped and beaten by a stranger at her Southeast Portland apartment.
Oregon law protects “information of a personal nature such as ... that kept in a personal, medical or similar file” from public disclosure. But in a March 4 posting on his MySpace page, Green recalled how he had taken “a lady our age to the hospital after being raped at knife point, by a caucasian [sic] male of average build.”
While the paramedic did not disclose the victim's name or exact address, he provided the approximate location of the rape and detailed her description of the assailant. “All told he was in her apartment about an hour, and this very pretty, otherwise normal woman's life is irrepprably [sic] changed,” he said.
As a result of the posting, the woman alleges, “the media contacted [her] to question her about the assault” and she has suffered emotional distress and other damages of at least $1 million.
Green breached his duty to “protect the plaintiff from the unauthorized disclosure of her protected health information,” the complaint says, while his employer is liable for negligent hiring, training and supervision.
The fact that the media found the victim suggests Green disclosed enough in his posting to make her identifiable. And Oregon lists “emergency medical technician” among the health care providers covered by its “protected health information” law.
But some courts have declined to extend the physician-patient privilege to communications between a paramedic and a patient. Since ambulance technicians are not “physicians,” the Louisiana Supreme Court said in Med-Express v. Tarpley, 629 So.2d 331 (1993),
there is no privilege as to any type of communication made to them by the injured party nor as to any observations they may have made about the injured party's condition.
In Shulman v. Group W Productions, 51 Cal.App.4th 850 (1986), the California Court of Appeals found that a nurse on an airborne rescue team did not violate the physician-patient privilege because there was no evidence she “was working as the agent for or under the supervision of any physician while the rescue was in progress.”
Green could also raise the defense that his disclosures served the public's interest in crime prevention. “My advice: fight,” he recommended in his posting. “It's only a knife, and any rapist is a coward who will probably turn tail at any resistance.”
The case may turn out to be one of the more significant of at least 17 MySpace-related suits (see ) that have been filed in the past year or so.
By Matthew Heller 4/30/07
