NC hospital system settles patients Meta Pixel lawsuit for $6.6 million

Novant Health, a major hospital system in North Carolina, has agreed to a multi-million dollar settlement over its handling of patient's private information.

Novant, which is based in Winston-Salem and has locations in Wake Forest, was using something called a tracking pixel on its website.

5 On Your Side first told you in 2022 that WakeMed, Duke University Hospital and UNC Health were using those same tracking pixels from Facebook’s parent company Meta, on their websites.

WakeMed and Duke both faced lawsuits over the data collected by the pixels and now Novant has settled a patient lawsuit for $6.6 million.

Ten Novant Health patients, including a Raleigh man, filed the lawsuit.

It described the pixel used on the hospital system’s MyChart portal as a "tiny 1×1 invisible GIF files that effectively open a spying window through which a website funnels data about users and their actions to third parties."

Meta’s pixel was intended to collect data about how users interact with a website to be used for marketing purposes.

However, patients say the pixel collected medical data from Novant’s MyChart portal in violation of HIPAA standards.

Novant patients who used the portal or Novant’s website between May 1, 2020 and August 12, 2022 may be eligible class members and can learn more about the settlement here.

In 5 On Your Side’s 2022 report, we spoke to WakeMed patient Alex Ondrick who was notified by the hospital system that his data may have been transmitted to Facebook in error.

He told us today he hasn’t heard much since.

WakeMed is still involved in a lawsuit over its use of Meta Pixel. 5 On Your Side did reach out to them to ask if WakeMed has determined what patient information was transmitted to Meta through the pixel. We have not yet heard back.

Duke University Hospital is also still involved in a pixel lawsuit. Duke previously told us they did not transmit patients’ protected health information to Meta. When asked again today, Duke told us they do not have any updates to that statement.

We reached out to UNC Health and they sent us this statement, "UNC Health is not involved in any lawsuits related to Meta Pixel. We never used Meta Pixel with any authenticated data where patient information is stored. We remain confident that our conservative approach to using tracking pixels did not jeopardize any patient information."

After the settlement, Novant posted a statement saying, "Novant Health takes privacy and the care of personal information very seriously and values patient trust to keep patients’ medical information private. Novant Health will continue to be as transparent as possible and provide information to patients. The proposed settlement is not admission of wrongdoing, and the court did not find any wrongdoing on the part of Novant Health."