Georgia Supreme Court kills part of state's tort reform law

The ruling against releasing medical records is the latest to chip away at the state's liability protections.

By Amy Lynn Sorrel, AMNews staff. June 18, 2007.

Georgia doctors might find it harder to defend medical liability lawsuits after the high court there overturned a state law requiring plaintiffs to authorize disclosure of their medical records when they file their cases.

Passed as part of a 2005 tort reform package, the statute required plaintiffs to attach to their complaint a privacy waiver agreeing to immediately turn over relevant health information to the defense. Failing to include the authorization would subject the lawsuit to dismissal.

But in its 6-1 decision in Allen v. Wright, the Supreme Court of Georgia said the statute did not measure up to federal HIPAA privacy standards. Part of the problem, the court found, was that the law did not outline how to specifically and meaningfully identify health information relevant to a case and thus open to disclosure. Judges objected to the measure's failure to inform patients of their right to revoke the authorization for information they viewed as irrelevant.

Making dismissal of the lawsuit the only way a plaintiff could object to any disclosure did not comply with the federal privacy statute, the court said. The law also fell short, the majority found, because it didn't set a time frame for when access to the medical information would expire.

Because the measure offered less protection than the federal medical records privacy statute, the court rejected it. This leaves it up to state legislators to craft a new one.

Doctors say the ruling defies well-established state law putting plaintiffs on notice that they must automatically waive certain privacy rights when they put their health at issue in a lawsuit.