Lawsuit claiming Facebook had access to Jefferson’s private patient portal is dismissed
Attorneys behind a proposed class action against Jefferson Health sought to replace the named patients on the complaint after two years. A federal judge dismissed the case.
A federal judge on Wednesday tossed a proposed class-action lawsuit by Jefferson Health patients accusing the Philadelphia area’s largest health system of allowing Facebook’s third-party tracking technology, Meta Pixel, access to private patient information.
After two years of litigation, and surviving a previous effort to dismiss the complaint, attorneys who filed the lawsuit asked the court to replace the named patients as the representatives of the proposed class. The lawyers said some aspects of their clients’ interactions with Jefferson’s web properties undermined the case.
District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe rejected the request and dismissed the lawsuit, writing in an opinion that the plaintiffs had “ample opportunity to identify any defects or issues” over the past two years.
“They have not identified any discovery or new evidence to justify such delay, nor have they explained how counsel’s due diligence did not determine the limitations of Plaintiffs’ claims,” Rufe said.
» READ MORE: Lawsuit claims Facebook had access to Jefferson’s private patient portal
The judge noted that the attorneys also missed the deadline to file for class certifications and did not respond to discovery requests.
Attorneys David Cohen and James Zouras of the Stephan Zouras firm, who filed the complaint, did not respond to a request for comment.
The original lawsuit was filed in 2022 in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on behalf of Robert Stewart and Nancy Murphy, who suspected that their health information had been compromised when they started seeing Facebook ads related to medical issues, such as diabetes, kidney stones, and smoking cessation that they had discussed with Jefferson providers through the patient portal.
The lawsuit says Jefferson patients were tracked on the health system’s public-facing homepage, as well as within a password-protected portal where doctors and patients communicate.
Jefferson denied in legal filings that it used Meta Pixel on its patient portals. It acknowledged using third-party tracking technology on its public-facing websites, which do not contain private medical information.
Jefferson did not respond to a request for comment.
In April, Cohen and Zouras asked the court to replace Stewart and Murphy with a third patient, Cathryn Thorpe, as the named plaintiff representing the patients in the class action.
The attorneys said Stewart and Murphy would remain members of the proposed class of harmed patients.
Jefferson’s attorneys argued in court filings that the request to replace the named plaintiffs was an admission that there was “no live controversy” and the suit should be tossed out.
Rufe couldn’t square how the patients’ case was too problematic to serve as named plaintiffs but they could still remain members of the class. She denied the request and dismissed the lawsuit.