A gynaecologist secretly photographed pelvic examinations.

The prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore has agreed to pay US$190 million in compensation to 7,000 victims of a gynaecologist who secretly photographed pelvic examinations.

Dr Nikita A. Levy, a gynecologist and obstetrician for Johns Hopkins Community Medicine in Baltimore, was dismissed in February 2013 after a female colleague noticed that he wore a pen around his neck which was really a concealed camera. He committed suicide shortly afterwards.

The FBI concluded that Levy had not shared his photos or uploaded them to the internet. The lawyer for the class action suit, Jonathan Schochor, disagrees. “I think there’s overwhelming probability” that the images were shared, he told the New York Times. The lawsuit charged Johns Hopkins with invasion of privacy, emotional distress and negligence in its oversight of Dr Levy.

Many of Levy’s patients are very distressed. “There’s been a huge, devastating result to this whole thing,” Mr Schochor said. “Many have had changes in their ability to focus, problems with sleeplessness. Some have had changes in their relationships with spouses and significant others.” Some patients, he said, have lost trust in the medical system and now refuse to go to doctors or take their children.

“Words cannot describe how deeply sorry we are for all this has affected,” two top officials of Johns Hopkins wrote to former patients last year. “We are terribly sorry this has happened and for the distress you must be feeling… Protecting patients’ dignity and privacy is part of the core values that we instill in our patient safety procedures.”

This is a record payout for cases involving a doctor’s violation of privacy, but it is not extraordinary. In 2012 there were two gigantic settlements. A lawsuit over a Delaware paediatrician who recorded assaults on hundreds of children led to a $120 million payout and a Connecticut hospital settled for about $50 million after an endocrinologist used a medical study as a pretence to take obscene photographs of children.

Patient modesty and privacy are vital in the doctor-patient relationship. Scandals like this could scupper the use of Google Glass in a medical setting.

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Michael Cook

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