Allegheny Health Network, Highmark Health Used AI Documentation Tool Without Consent, Class Action Suit Claims

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A proposed class action lawsuit alleges that Allegheny Health Network and parent company Highmark Health have violated a Pennsylvania privacy law by using an AI-powered ambient recording tool to document conversations between patients and their doctors without informed consent.

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The 58-page lawsuit claims that Allegheny Health Network and Highmark Health have violated the Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act and doctor-patient confidentiality by failing to obtain informed consent before deploying the Abridge AI’s clinical documentation tool in exam rooms and other clinical settings to record conversations between patients and their healthcare providers.

According to the complaint, Abridge AI’s ambient documentation tool, once activated by a clinician, passively captures the “unfiltered” conversations patients have with medical providers and transmits the information to Abridge’s servers and processes it into a clinical note. The lawsuit says that Abridge also uses the recordings to train and improve its AI models.

However, the filing contends that patients were not provided with adequate notice that private medical information from their conversations with healthcare providers would be transmitted to, retained, and used by Abridge AI for commercial purposes. According to the case, some patients were informed only that an AI tool would be used during their appointments, not that the data would be used to create a “corpus” of confidential medical information to train Abridge’s AI models. Other patients were “told nothing at all,” the suit adds.

“A hospital cannot unilaterally decide to record a private conversation and hand that recording to an outside company to keep and use for its own purposes,” the suit asserts.

More broadly, the case argues that the defendants’ use of AI clinical documentation was not an isolated incident, but rather a “deliberate and systemic” practice by Allegheny Health Network and Highmark Health that has deprived patients of the confidential medical services they paid for, with patient information allegedly captured “in a manner that involved deception and betrayal of trust.”

Instead of informing patients that their most sensitive medical information would be transmitted to and used by Abridge AI, the defendants chose to stay silent, the lawsuit claims.

“A clear disclosure that the entire conversation would be recorded, sent to an outside company, and potentially used to build that company’s products would have led many patients to say no,” the case says. “Silence let [Allegheny Health Network and Highmark Health] deploy the technology without the friction, delay, or refusals that honest disclosure would have invited.”

Per the case, the defendants adopted the AI documentation tool to lighten the note-taking process for clinicians, accelerate prior authorization for healthcare insurance members, and capture billing information, but did not fully disclose the purposes for which patients’ information would be used, much less obtain consent.

The Allegheny Health Network class action lawsuit looks to cover all individuals who, between the date Allegheny Health Network and Highmark Health deployed Abridge and the date of class certification, attended a medical appointment at a Pennsylvania facility operated by or affiliated with Allegheny Health Network during which Abridge was activated to record, transcribe, or process the patient encounter.

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