Santé Québec hit with class action lawsuit over access to medical records without consent

A class-action lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Superior Court against Santé Québec to compensate Quebecers whose personal information was accessed without consent and without valid reason.

The lawsuit, led by the law firm Klyden Legal, seeks compensation on behalf of individuals whose right to privacy was allegedly violated by Santé Québec.

“The plaintiff, Geneviève Déziel, is seeking, on behalf of the group, damages of $15,000 per person, as well as punitive damages of $5,000 per person for invasion of privacy and confidentiality of medical records … for a value of at least $100 million,” according to a press release published by Klyden Legal.

“The goal is to put an end to the intrusion by health-care professionals into patients’ medical records without justification,” said lawyer Nancy Fortin of Klyden Legal.

According to the law firm, “several thousand users of the Quebec health-care system have had their medical records accessed without consent and without professional justification by a health-care professional in recent years, often solely out of personal curiosity or to pass on medical information to third parties.”

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Fortin said that “there is even someone in one of the disciplinary complaints we cited who was selling the information to an insurance company.”

Some files, she added, “are accessed even after a person’s death.”

The lawyer was referring in particular to the son of the plaintiff, Geneviève Déziel, who initiated the legal proceedings.

Accessing information about a deceased person

In 2019, Déziel’s son died by suicide at the age of 19, “48 hours after his last appointment with a psychiatrist and less than a month after his third hospitalization at the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Québec,” according to the request submitted to court on Tuesday.

The plaintiff “wanted to know why the institution in question had not taken into account the information provided by the family following the deterioration of her son’s mental state.”

She therefore requested her son’s medical records from the authorities, as well as a list of the people who had consulted those records over the years.

“Upon receiving the documents, the plaintiff was shocked to discover that her son’s medical records had been accessed by nearly 11 different people for months, even years, after his death,” according to the document filed on Tuesday.

However, according to the plaintiff, none of these people had been involved in the care of her deceased son.

Shortly after the tragedy, Déziel participated in a report in the newspaper Le Soleil, questioning the quality of care her son had received. The court document states that “the day after the newspaper article was published, visits to the plaintiff’s son’s medical file skyrocketed.”

The law firm encourages people to check the “List of individuals who have accessed your health information” directly on the Carnet Santé Québec website, in the Profile section, to verify whether there are any irregularities in their medical records.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews