Hospital agrees to pay $190 million for recorded exams
Johns Hopkins Health System has agreed pay $190 million to 8,000 women who were patients of a gynecologist found to be secretly recording their exams.
The women’s faces aren’t visible in the recordings and police don’t believe the images have been shared, but they have been traumatized nonetheless, says plaintiffs’ attorney Jonathan Schochor.
“They stopped seeing their doctors,” he said at a press conference on Monday. “They stopped taking their children to see doctors. They refuse to see a male OBGYN. Many refuse to see any OBGYN.”
If the settlement were divided equally, each woman might receive roughly $24,000, but compensation will be made after reviewing each patient’s case.
“The question is how do [they] allocate that fairly among the victims?” says J.B. Silvers, a former insurance executive and a professor at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management.
Counseling costs or lost wages might be taken into account. But Silvers says it’s a tricky, delicate problem trying to determine the amount of trauma each women may have suffered, especially with so many victims.
“We’ve done this with the World Trade Center, for instance, so this process isn’t new,” Silvers says.
The doctor accused of making the recordings committed suicide after being discovered last year.
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