Wellstar Health System & Cone Health Settle Pixel Lawsuits
Wellstar Health System and Cone Health (operating as Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital) have agreed to settle class action lawsuits tied to the use of tracking pixels on their websites or patient portals. The settlements resolve claims that the hospitals shared patient data with third parties through embedded tracking technology.
Why this matters: Hospitals put tracking pixels on their sites, and those pixels sent patient data to outside companies, often including details about appointments, conditions, or treatments. Patients did not agree to that. They went to a hospital website to manage their health, not to be tracked by advertisers. These settlements cost the hospitals money, but the deeper problem is that health systems were running ad-tech tools on pages where people had every reason to expect privacy. The pixel lawsuits keep landing because hospitals have been slow to treat their websites like the sensitive health environments they actually are.
Who should care: Healthcare professionals · Privacy officers · Compliance
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