After ABC filmed the death of a man in the ER of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for its reality show NY Med, his family sued the hospital and the network for violation of privacy.
The patient, Mark Chanko, was brought into the hospital after being struck by a New York City sanitation vehicle and died soon after. The film crew caught his death on camera and broadcast it in August 2012, where his widow Anita saw it.
She and her family filed a lawsuit against the hospital and the broadcast network, which pulled the clip from its website soon after, according to an investigation by Pro Publica and The New York Times.
The hospital moved to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that because the patient's face was blurred and his family was never identified in the clip, it was not a violation of privacy.
A New York appellate court dismissed the case in November 2014, saying the plaintiffs could not "maintain an action against defendant doctor or defendant hospital for breach of the duty not to disclose personal information, since no such information regardingplaintiffs' decedent was disclosed."
The family is currently working on an appeal, according to Pro Publica.
"Taken to its logical conclusion, what they're saying is you can invite anyone in, and unless the patient objects at that very moment, there's no violation of the patient's privacy," said Joy Pritts, an expert in state health privacy laws who until recently was the chief privacy officer at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, to Pro Publica. "That's crazy."