[BreachExchange] Judge rules in favor of UMMC in trial against former employees who stole patient records

[Terrell Byrd]

https://mississippitoday.org/2021/10/26/ummc-trial-employees-stole-patient-records/


A federal judge has ruled in favor of the University of Mississippi Medical
Center over litigation against three former employees who stole patient
medical records for their own use and then lied about possessing them for
years.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves on Oct. 8 issued a default judgment in
the federal trade secrets lawsuit, saying the defendants’ “clear,
persistent pattern of perjury, evidence destruction, and concealment”
warranted the default judgment.

The case centers around Dr. Spencer Sullivan, who UMMC hired in July 2014
to head its Hemophilia Treatment Center. As part of his employment,
Sullivan agreed to refrain from taking or using patient information for his
own benefit, including soliciting patients for his own independent
practice. However, in January 2016, Sullivan began arranging to start his
own for-profit hemophilia clinic and pharmacy.

Over the course of the next few months, Sullivan coordinated with other
UMMC staff —namely co-defendants Linnea McMillan and Kathryn Sue Stevens —
to prepare for the new clinic’s opening. This included compiling UMMC
patient records into a spreadsheet they called “the List.” This spreadsheet
included patients’ birthdate, diagnosis, prescriptions, dose and frequency,
insurance, pharmacy and home and mobile telephone numbers.

Sullivan resigned from his position at UMMC in June 2016, and then used the
records stolen from UMMC to solicit these patents to continue their
treatment at Sullivan’s new clinic in Madison called Mississippi Center for
Advanced Medicine. Sullivan recruited at least 20 UMMC employees to work
for him at his new clinic, and the majority of UMMC’s hemophilia patients
followed their physicians to his clinic.

During the course of both state and federal lawsuits brought on by UMMC,
Sullivan, McMillan and Stevens lied multiple times under oath, denying they
had ever taken the patient records from UMMC. The existence of “the List”
came out following a 2018 Clarion-Ledger article. After reading the
article, defendant Linnea McMillan’s ex-husband, Aubrey McMillan, provided
UMMC’s legal council with a copy of “the List” he found in his ex-wife’s
car.

All three defendants continued to deny taking or possessing “the List”
until March 2020, when Harris admitted to lying in her deposition and
produced 1,469 pages of text messages sent by herself and fellow defendants
that revealed they had conspired to shred the stolen documents, violating
the clinic’s policy against destroying patient information.

Sullivan also committed perjury multiple times, and as recently as April
2021, by denying he possessed a hard drive containing files and emails from
UMMC. He only admitted possessing the files on a hard drive and a thumb
drive after a Magistrate Judge forced him to choose between producing the
hard drives or his computer.

“Defendants’ lies and evasions, particularly Dr. Sullivan’s recent conduct
in relation to the long-sought hard drives, suggest that nothing less than
the full exercise of this court’s inherent power will command the
defendants’ respect for the judicial process, or secure their commitment to
telling this court the truth,” Reeves wrote.

With a default judgment issued, a trial on damages will now take place on
the date previously set for jury trial on Feb. 16, 2022.
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