Medical 'gag order' company sued over mutual privacy agreements

Medical Justice Services Inc., a company that claims to protect the interest of physicians, abruptly has stopped selling or recommending its "mutual privacy agreements" following a class-action lawsuit filed with help from consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

Since 2007, Medical Justice has urged physicians to have their patients sign the documents, also referred to as "medical gag orders," to relinquish to them the copyright of any comment they should make about the doctor online as a method of squelching negative posts.

"We retired the form," Dr. Jeffrey Segal, a neurosurgeon and founder of Medical Justice, told MSNBC. "We probably should have retired the agreement earlier, but today's the day we did it."

Segal made this announcement late last week, in the wake of a lawsuit led by patient Robert Lee, who allegedly signed an anti-defamation contract with dentist Stacy Makhnevich under duress. The patient said he signed while in severe pain from a toothache and then received bills from Maknevich charging $100 a day for copyright infringement when he refused to take down posts that accused her office of overcharging him.

The two sites on which Lee posted his complaints, Yelp and DoctorBase, also refused to remove the posts at Maknevich's demand, a move that techdirt bloggers praised.

According to Lee's lawyer, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen, the problems with the contracts are many. For starters, he asserts that contracts assigning copyrights to doctors are invalid because patients' posts constitute fair use. He also says that they represent an abuse of copyright law in their attempt to censor criticism. In addition, the suit claims that the "take-down requests" triggered when such contracts are breached violates HIPAA, as they expose patients' protected health information to website owners.

Finally, experts say it's an unethical and misleading business practice for doctors to require patients to sign such forms or for companies to peddle them to doctors in the first place. According to Online Media Daily, Medical Justice intends to shift its offerings to a "computer-based eMerit medical reputation service," though it's not yet clear what that new service will involve.

To learn more:
- read the article from MSNBC
- read the article from iHealthBeat
- check out the post from techdirt
- see the article from Online Media Daily

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